When you walk into most Head Start centers in Colorado, the first thing that stands out isn’t the bright crayon drawings on the walls or the low hum of kids learning through play. Teachers are to blame. They look so tired. The number of things they have to deal with—a crying child here, a behavior problem there—and how few people seem to ask them if they’re okay. It turns out that a lot of them aren’t.
A disturbing picture is being painted by research from the Colorado School of Public Health. About 46% of the people who work in early childhood education in Colorado get some kind of public assistance, like food stamps, Medicaid, or programs for people who are having a hard time making ends meet. Their hourly wage is about $18.50. These are the same people who shape kids’ early years and will one day work in schools, offices, and communities. The math doesn’t make sense, and it’s getting harder to ignore what will happen.
There is a real and clear physical cost. Researchers have found that early childhood educators are more likely than other workers with the same level of education and income to have long-term conditions like diabetes, obesity, lower back pain, and severe headaches. Part of that is because of how the job is done. Sitting in furniture that is too small for kids for nine to twelve hours. Not getting a real break very often. Dealing with constant behavioral problems that would wear anyone out, often without any real help from coworkers or supervisors.
Head Start is the largest federally funded early childhood program in the country. Its staff take care of poor children. They tend to have it worse. The depression rate among Head Start teachers is between 25% and 32%, while the rate for the whole workforce is about 18%. That gap isn’t caused by rounding. This is a sign that something is wrong with the way this workforce is being supported, or not.
It’s interesting and a little strange how geography affects the experience. A study of 332 Head Start workers in rural and urban Colorado found that rural workers were less emotionally worn out than their urban counterparts, even though they had lower average incomes and levels of education. In rural areas, people tend to get closer to each other and things move a little more slowly. Class sizes are bigger in cities, rules for following them are stricter, and there is a certain kind of pressure that comes with being dense. Teachers in cities were more stressed, but they also had more hope, resilience, and self-efficacy, which suggests they don’t lack resources but are just overworked.
Here is where the WELL program comes in. Researchers at the Colorado School of Public Health made the Well-Being of the ECE Workforce in Low-Resource Locations program to specifically address what they saw. They did this after working in this community for more than 15 years. It works with Head Start programs to provide support for things like mindfulness, sleep, and coping skills, which is something the workers themselves said they needed. One center even made a relaxation lounge so that staff could take a break from the floor for a while and get their bearings.
It’s still early. The results are just preliminary. But the numbers point to a bright future. Most of the people who took part said they were happy with the program. A lot of them said that their centers actively pushed them to join. One participant talked about using mindfulness techniques in the classroom. She said that she would catch herself about to get angry with a difficult child and remember to take a deep breath, stop, and ask for help.
There’s also a darker layer that needs to be named. Mistreatment at work in this group of people isn’t looked into much, but it does happen. The most common type was condescending or demeaning treatment, which about one in four people in a study in Colorado said they had experienced. People who were mistreated in more ways said they had more bad mental health days each month. Younger workers (18–44 years old) said their mental health was much worse than that of their older coworkers. These results suggest that the issue is not just a lack of funding across the board. Aside from that, it’s also about how people are treated at work.
This won’t be easy to fix, and it’s possible that no one wellness program can do it by itself. Pay needs to go up. The ratios of staff need to be changed. These centers need to change the way they work. But what programs like WELL are doing—which is to really think about worker well-being, ask staff what they need, and then build something to meet those needs—is at least the start of facing a problem that hasn’t been dealt with for too long.
