By MORIAH BALINGIT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some Head Start preschools around the country could be at risk of closing temporarily because they remain locked out of their federal funding, a problem that first surfaced last week during President Donald Trump’s aborted effort to freeze federal grants.
Center directors around the country last week were locked out of the online payment management system where they submit invoices and access grant money for Head Start, which serves some of the nation’s neediest kids and families. Medicaid administrators reported similar problems.
The website went back online for many operators. But a week later, some administrators said they continued to experience intermittent outages of the website that led to significant delays in payments. Dozens of centers are affected, according to the National Head Start Association.
Already, problems accessing federal grants have led 17 Head Start centers in Michigan and Wisconsin to close temporarily.
Other centers in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are also contemplating shutting down if they can’t access funding soon.
“If this situation is not resolved immediately, I am anticipating seeing more centers having to close,” said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.
As of Tuesday afternoon, a half dozen Head Start programs in Wisconsin were still locked out of their funding. One center in Waukesha that serves more than 200 kids shut down a day after the website went down, and remained closed for a week. It is set to reopen Wednesday morning after getting access to the federal money.
The disruption coincided with a far-reaching directive from the Trump administration to halt federal grants, which sparked chaos throughout the federal government. The White House later clarified that the order was not supposed to include Head Start and Medicaid. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt last week called the Medicaid problems an outage and has not said whether the Head Start payment system was purposefully taken offline.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
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