The Nina Nicks Joseph Child Development Center in downtown Mobile celebrated a milestone this spring, marking 50 years of its Early Head Start program with a visit from a Mobile Police Department mounted-unit miniature horse and donkey, and news of a significant countywide expansion.
Gulf Regional Early Childhood Services, which facilitates Early Head Start locally, announced it has grown from five partner sites, including the Joseph Center, to seven, thanks to two federal grants funneled through the Alabama Department of Human Resources and the state’s Office of School Readiness. The expansion will allow the program to serve 192 children across Mobile County, nearly double the 104 it had been serving.
GRECS Executive Director Wendy McEarchern said the funding effectively reverses cuts tied to the 2013 federal budget sequestration, which had forced partner sites like the Dearborn YMCA to cut its enrollment in half, down to just eight children. With the new grant, enrollment across the Dearborn, Joseph and Soaring Eagle centers will grow to 32 children. Alabama was one of only three states to receive this particular round of federal funding, McEarchern said, which is tied to a broader childcare subsidy program that helps low-income parents afford care.
The expansion also adds two new partner sites aimed at reaching underserved parts of the county: Starlight Early Learning Center in Calvert and Small Wonders Early Learning Center in Grand Bay. McEarchern said reaching rural and hard-to-serve areas of Mobile County was a specific goal of the grant.
Parents like Rachel Alexander, who enrolled her two children at the Joseph Center after learning about it through an early intervention program, say the program’s emphasis on parent involvement, including a voting seat on daycare decisions through the policy council, has made a lasting difference in her sons’ development and communication skills.
Despite the expansion, administrators say they remain worried about looming state budget pressures that could put a portion of Alabama’s roughly 28,000 subsidized child care slots at risk in the years ahead, a threat McEarchern called potentially devastating for the state’s most vulnerable working families.