RECOVERY ACF Early Head Start Start-Up Consultant Recruitment, Training and Coordination.

Purpose of the Task Order:

The Head Start program is administered by the Office of Head Start (OHS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The Head Start program served over 908,000 children in FY2007. More than 62,000 of those children were served in 650 Early Head Start programs.

The Early Head Start (EHS) program was started in 1995, thirty years after the first Head Start preschool programs were funded, to serve pregnant women, infants, and toddlers through the provision of early, continuous, intensive and comprehensive child development and family support services. As a part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (P.L. 111-5) (ARRA), OHS received dollars for the sole purpose of serving additional pregnant women, infants and toddlers in its Early Head Start program. The purpose of this contract is to develop criteria, recruit, train, and maintain a database of approximately 120 Infant and Toddler consultants who will serve as Start-Up Planners to many of the 600 newly awarded Early Head Start programs. Start-up planners are an allowable use of Head Start funds. A start-up planner is a consultant, hired by the program, to help facilitate the programs start-up team through the process of planning and preparing for the implementation of Early Head Start services. The current ARRA-funded expansion of Early Head Start grantees, the first since 2002, will nearly double the number of EHS programs serving pregnant women, infants and toddlers. This task order will purchase services to train a new cadre of consultants to support the effective and rapid start up of most of the new programs.