by David Snow
The Paducah Sun
March 26, 2022
Used with permission.
Seeing children with shovels at a sandpile is usually not noteworthy, much less newsworthy, but when they’re wearing hard hats, you know they mean business.
That is how ground was broken Friday for the new Paducah Head Start building. Head Start students donned protective headgear and posed with a shovel surrounded by Head Start teachers and staff and Paducah school district administrators.
Because the actual building site on Otis Dinning Drive had heavy equipment and was muddy, the ceremony was held across the street on the campus of Paducah Tilghman High School.
The building is expected to be open in fall 2023.
The location of the Head Start building near PTHS is no coincidence. High school students taking early childhood education courses at the Paducah Innovation Hub will be able to walk across the street to the Head Start building and get hands-on experience as they pursue careers in teaching or child care.
Paducah Head Start Director Kristy Lewis told those on hand at the ceremony that the local program began in the summer of 1965 as an eight-week summer program for children of economically disadvantaged families.
“Today marks the beginning of another chapter in the story of Paducah Head Start preschool,” she said.
“This new facility will allow us to serve 320 preschool Head Start children. It is designed with 16 full-day classrooms, occupational and physical therapy, speech-language and social sensory rooms.”
The building will also house administrative offices, a family service suite, homeless transitional spaces with a clothing and food pantry, library media center, parent and staff training facilities, a kitchen and a gymnasium.
The $14.5 million grant provided by the Office of Head Start Administration of Children and Families came about after the current building on Sixth Street was flooded by rain on Sept. 1, 2017, when Hurricane Harvey moved through the region.
The grant was announced in April 2020, and the Paducah school board approved $13.16 in capital outlay funds for the building project.
IRA Architects, the firm that build the Paducah Innovation Hub, was also awarded the bid for the Head Start Building project.
Paducah Head Start is a part of the Paducah school district, so it serves children who live within the Paducah city limit. It is a federally funded program through the Administration of Children and Families.
“The premise of Head Start is to provide every child — regardless of their circumstances at birth — a great start for learning,” Lewis told The Sun on Thursday. “We truly want them to reach their fullest potential, so that means that we are allowing all of our families in Paducah the opportunity to have and receive comprehensive services.
“For Head Start, it’s not just the education side of things. We have an entire family service staff, we’ve got four family advocates on staff, three social workers, two parent engagement educators and a mental health counselor along with our family service manager.”
Paducah Head Start helps prepare children age 3 to 5 for school. They must be 3 before Aug. 1 of that year.
“The four of the biggest components for Head Start are education, health of families, parent involvement and social services,” Lewis said. “When I talk about social services, that is providing resources to families.
“For parent involvement, we want them to be here; we want them to be a part of our program and, hopefully, we will continue to see our COVID numbers stay low and we’ll be able to engage more families inside the building for programming.”
The health component includes immunizations, dental care, medical care, mental health care, nutrition and helping to identify health concerns.
Head Start works with a combination of full-day services that typically run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. as well as half-day services that run from 8 a.m. to noon and from noon to 4 p.m.
“It just depends on how fast parents call us and get their application in,” Lewis said. “The sooner the better, because we want to prioritize the need of the families in our community.”
The current Head Start building has a capacity of 275 children, so the new building will boost capacity by 16.4%, and all of the children will be in a full-day setting in the new building.
“The new center is going to be great for our community,” Lewis said. “…It’s great for our children to be in an environment that supports early learning.”
Lewis said Head Start will work with local colleges more like Murray State or West Kentucky Community and Technical College. The new building will have observation rooms in every suite for teachers in training to observe the classrooms.
“That also helps when we have mental health counselors and outside resources who come in who need to observe children in a classroom setting,” Lewis said. “Sometimes, when adults go into the classroom, we’re more of a disturbance. That observation area will be a great teaching model.”
The new building will also have an office for Heather Anderson, the Paducah school district’s McKinney-Vento liaison, to work with homeless transitional families that will also have a clothing and food pantry.
“We will have a very large playground in the back of the building,” Lewis said. “The playground will be a combination of a natural playground, where kids can enjoy learning about gardening or tinkering with building towers and blocks out of wooden pieces and a mud kitchen where they can play with water or build mud pies — things you do at a natural environment.
“We are also going to have a commercial playground like people are used to seeing. There will be a bike path out there so kids can ride their bikes around. A piece I’m really excited about: We’ve worked with Jonathan Perkins, a landscape architect with BFW Engineers, and he has helped design this play structure. One of the big pieces on our playground will be a train to show the railway system here in Paducah.”
The playground will be in the shape of the number 8, and the other side of the playground will have a big tugboat to represent Paducah’s river industry.
Paducah Head Start is preparing for registration for the next school year. That begins with a developmental screening at the site at 1350 S. Sixth St. Screenings will be held over several days beginning May 6.
Applications are available at the current Head Start building.
“Families can call us now and schedule those appointments,” Lewis said. “There will be flyers around Paducah letting families know that it is time to start that application process again.”
Information about Paducah Head Start can be obtained by going to the Head Start website by calling 270-444-5780, by clicking on the “Schools” tab at paducah.kyschools.us or by going to the Paducah Head Start Facebook page.
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