Head Start is at Risk
  October 30, 2025 Happy Halloween eve, Meteor ghouls, Anyone sporting any super cool costumes this weekend? I’m dressing in the same one I wore last year: exhausted mom whose sanity relies entirely on very long showers. Or maybe I’ll join the fray and dress up as Rumi.  I KNOW YOU DIDN’T THINK I WOULD DRESS UP AS STAGE RUMI. SWEATPANT RUMI FOR THE WIN. In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the larger implications of losing access to Head Start. Plus, three questions about embracing your inner crone. Goin up, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONA much bigger picture: At the end of this week, more than 100 Head Start centers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico will not receive their funding due to the government shutdown and may have to close their doors. That could leave 58,000 children without the early education programming and meals provided by Head Start centers. In some states, closures have already begun, and communities are scrambling to fill in the childcare gap left behind. On the surface, all of this may seem like an unfortunate but temporary side effect of the shutdown—a harm that can be undone once we flip a switch and turn the government back on. But what does it look like when you zoom out ever so slightly? It looks like the slow but successful execution of Project 2025. In its entirety, we know that Project 2025, released in April 2023, is a manifesto against the poor, immigrants, and anyone else who is not a white, Christian, heterosexual, cisgendered male. Some lowlights include: reversing FDA approval of mifepristone, ending DEI programs, and eliminating the Department of Education. And, relevant to this week’s news, ending Head Start. Project 2025 claims the Head Start program has “little or no long-term academic value for children,” which is why Roger Severino (who authored this section of Project 2025) lists “Eliminate Head Start” as part of the “conservative promise.” The current shutdown is proving effective in delivering on that promise. If I’m starting to sound like a gal who wears a tin foil hat in her spare time, just take a look at the facts. The National Women’s Law Center identified targeted attacks on Head Start from the administration beginning in January and continuing every month. Another tenet of P25 and this administration is to create a scenario where more parents are staying home to raise their own children or leaving their children with relatives. In the conservative worldview, day care is for parents who simply don’t want to parent, which would make Head Start—which has been around since 1965—a key part of the problem, funded by tax dollars. It’s all connected. But the attacks on Head Start are helping to create a Grand Canyon-sized fissure between the wealthy and the working class by playing up the narrative that those with means shouldn’t be responsible for caring for those without. Conservatives have repeatedly called federal safety programs for the poor a misuse of taxpayer dollars, and Head Start and free early childhood education programs, often described as handouts by right-leaning pundits, fit perfectly into the false narrative of wealthy taxpayers being burdened by the needs of medium-to-low earners. If the cuts to federal safety programs continue, they may also serve another purpose: removing the poor from the political process. People often don’t get involved in politics when they’re spending their time hustling just to get food on the table. So it’s not just that SNAP isn’t being funded next month. It’s not just some Head Starts preparing to close. It’s not just funding shortages for WIC, the program that helps moms feed their kids. It’s all that and the increased militarized police presence in lower-income neighborhoods. It’s all that and kidnapping people of color off the streets and disappearing them into the system. It’s what Project 2025 called for. The government shutdown is simply delivering. AND:
 WHERE YOU BEEN GIRL? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WEEKEND PLANS  Three Questions About…Embracing Your Crone EraIt’s a thing, says Nina BargielBY BRIJANA PROOKER  COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE In the age of Ozempic and deep plane facelifts, in which every outward sign of aging is reversible as long as you have the luxury of money, author Nina Bargiel has a revolutionary idea: Embrace your crone era. It’s a spooky concept, particularly post-2020, when staring at our faces over Zoom prompted a plastic surgery boom, pushing us past body positivity and even body neutrality, all the way into mainstream body hate. But it’s Halloween, the perfect time to honor our wisdom and warts. In THE CRONE ZONE: How To Get Older With Style, Nerve and a Little Bit of Magic, children’s TV writer Bargiel, 53 (who famously wrote the bra episode of Lizzie McGuire), uses the triple goddess concept to answer a key question: what’s a crone (AKA any woman over 35, according to my Instagram feed) to do? “Fuck it,” Bargiel writes. You’re a self-declared crone in your 50s. How would you describe “crone” for the modern era? So Baba Yaga has always been my bitch. Baba Yaga is the [Slavic] crone who has self-selected herself into the woods. She lives in a hut atop chicken legs. She has a terrifying fence made of human bones. When a traveler gets lost and knocks on her door, sometimes Baba Yaga eats them. And my thought is, this woman has given every indication she does not want to be bothered. So if you’re knocking on her door, and she ends up frying up your liver, you kind of deserve it, because she has made it very clear: leave her alone. For me, a crone is a woman who is sick and tired of making herself small to make other people feel comfortable. I refer to it as when your inner “fuck you” becomes your outer “fuck you.” In your book, you say, “Whether gracious grandmother or wicked witch, the crone is always cast as a woman whose best days are behind her.” What are we getting wrong about how we understand crones? The crone is overlooked and looked down upon, yet the crone is filled with magic. It’s funny because society [says] you’re invisible and you’re useless. But [crones also] have wisdom and power. If you think about Shakespeare and Macbeth and the three witches, I mean, they’re terrifying. Like, they are hags, but they will mess you up. And I will say, [the definition of] “older women” keeps getting younger by the day. I was talking to a woman at one of my [book] signings…about my crone book, and she was like, “I need this because people are treating me this way.” She’s 28 years old. I love your crone touchstones: “Wisdom, to know who we are, Knowledge, to understand what we want, and Fuck It, to do what we please.” What does “Fuck It” mean to you? [As a woman in a male-dominated writer’s room], you’ve got to be nice, you’ve got to get along. I played that [role] for a long time, and I discovered that it didn’t get me any further. I would bite my tongue, and then these men wouldn’t hire me again anyway. So why was I biting my tongue? I might as well just be 100% who I am. When COVID hit, and I had a divorce, and the entertainment industry was taking a bad hit, I just got sick of pretending everything was fine all the time. I sold my house [in Los Angeles] and moved in with my parents [in Illinois] and got a job working in the cheese department at Whole Foods. And there are people who are like, “You shouldn’t say that because people won’t take you seriously as a writer.” If people don’t take me seriously as a writer, after 25 years, after two Emmy nominations, after two Kids’ Choice Awards and a Gracie Allen Award, they were never going to take me seriously. So my Fuck It is, if you look at me as lesser because I’m part of the labor force, then I feel sorry for you, because life’s gonna hit you hard. Another part of Fuck It is I am 53, and my boyfriend just turned 35, so he is 18 years younger than I am, and fuck it, I don’t care. There are a lot of people that have said a lot of things, and by the way, they’re mostly men. Almost every woman, when they find out, are like, “Oh, good for you, sister.” If someone’s gonna try to shame me for that, fuck it. Women cannot build a hut atop chicken legs or have a fence made of human bones [like Baba Yaga]. But we can wear headphones. We can have all of these things that say, “Do not bother me,” and yet the travelers, who are usually men, still come knocking at our doors. Unfortunately, we cannot fry up their livers, but we do not have to entertain whatever it is they have to say.  Brijana Prooker is a Los Angeles-based freelance journalist and essayist covering health, gender, and culture. She’s a proud pit bull mama whose work has appeared in ELLE, Washington Post, Good Housekeeping, and Newsday.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
