Reauthorized Head Start Gets a Boost in Bush Proposal

Funding for the Head Start preschool program would rise to $7 billion under the President Bush’s budget request for fiscal 2009. The increase of about $150 million, or 2 percent, is the first recommended by Mr. Bush since 2002 for the federal government’s largest education-related program outside the Department of Education.

Advocates for the program, which serves close to 900,000 children, call the proposed increase a “token adjustment.”

A statement from the Alexandria-based National Head Start Association argues that the increase wouldn’t be enough to help local grantees carry out new requirements passed as part of a reauthorization of the program in 2007 or to make up for a lack of...