Boulder County Head Start reports full-year enrollment, $4.04 million in meal costs and pending grant application

Akane Ogren, division manager for Boulder County Head Start, told the Board of County Commissioners on June 17 that the program ended the 2024–25 school year nearly fully enrolled and is preparing to seek federal funding for the 2025–26 year.

"We have reached the end of the '24–'25 school year," Ogren said, reporting that the program logged total meal service costs of $4,040,742.70 and that May attendance averaged 84 percent, with overall school-year attendance at 85 percent. She said the program ended the year with 109 of 110 enrollment slots filled and that 56 children graduated to kindergarten.

Ogren described summer preparations, including a two-week preservice training and monthly professional-development sessions supported by the regional Head Start training and technical assistance coaching team. She said Head Start is rewriting position descriptions to align with federal Head Start performance standards and plans to present new role descriptions and companion guidance to the commissioners and the policy council before the school year begins.

The presenter said Head Start currently has six open positions, including three center director roles, a combined health services coordinator position (merging early childhood mental health consultation with prior health/safety/nutrition duties), one teacher and one teaching assistant, and that recruitment is underway.

On federal monitoring, Ogren said the program has one remaining open noncompliance from FA2 (period of correction ended May 17, 2025). Federal and regional monitors conducted interviews and document review on May 27; Ogren said staff presented documents and the program is awaiting a final determination expected this summer. The outstanding FA2 finding, she said, relates to medical and dental screening tracking and monitoring for children.

When a commissioner asked about how the dental-screening gap was addressed, Ogren said an existing partner that had done vision screenings expanded its services to include dental. "We were able to contract, just add on to a current, existing contract for the dental screenings," she said, noting Adventure Dental provided two screenings (fall and spring) and a dentist screened the children.

Ogren said the program will request approval at next week’s business meeting to submit an application for $1,561,229 in Head Start funds for 2025–26. She said that total is divided into two buckets: program operations and training and technical-assistance funds. Ogren explicitly stated training and technical assistance funds of $18,892; the program-operations subamount in the meeting record was unclear in the audio/transcript and is not specified here.

A commissioner asked whether the FA2 noncompliance would affect competitiveness for the grant. Ogren said corrective actions were described in the 2025 competition grant application and will be carried forward into the 2026 application; she said the program expects to demonstrate corrections and is hopeful the remaining finding will be resolved.

The board thanked Ogren and Head Start staff for their work and the public business meeting adjourned.

Next steps: the board is scheduled to consider formal approval to submit the $1,561,229 Head Start application at the upcoming business meeting and the program awaits the final federal/regional determination on the outstanding FA2 noncompliance.