Head Start Expands Services in West Salem

The Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Head Start program is expanding its services within West Salem. 

This new location, residing at 1205 Wallace Road, will offer early learning services to a community where options have historically been limited. “We’re doubling our impact for children and families here,” said Eva Pignotti, Chief Program Officer of Early Learning & Child Care. 

As new housing developments spring up in West Salem, deciding to expand was an easy choice for the agency. “There’s kind of been a bit of a childcare desert in the past in West Salem,” said Executive Director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, Jimmy Jones. “Especially an early learning desert; there just aren't enough services. A lot of folks are in really desperate need of our services, so opening a dedicated facility that we can develop over the course of time – it’s really exciting for our community.”

The former medical establishment was purchased in 2022 and renovated in 2023, then officially opened as the new Head Start site in January 2024, serving children ages three to five. 

“There is a second building on the property that we hope to use for the Early Head Start program, which is for infants and toddlers,” Pignotti said, “but the building is not suitable, so we’re trying to secure funding to demolish that building and put another building in its place.”

In the meantime, the facility sees 51 children in attendance.

Head start and Early Head Start, which serves infants and toddlers, are programs that are funded on a federal and state level, and provide early learning opportunities in a whole family scenario for children and families who are at the federal poverty level or below, or who are eligible to receive TANF or SSI, and recipients of SNAP benefits, as well as children in foster care or whose families are homeless. 

“It’s basically pre-school with a lot of supportive services around it,” said Pignotti. “We also have a school lunch program that is funded by the USDA, and we do health services to make sure all of our kids have vision and hearing screenings, height and weight assessments. We make sure they’re connected with a regular doctor and dentist, and that they’re on schedule for their well child exams and immunizations are current.”

Services aren’t just limited to children. Parents receive assistance, too. “We have staff who work with parents specifically on goal setting, parent advocacy. We have staff who do home visits and resource referral. We try to help our parents in plotting out the pathway they want to take in life to improve their family circumstances.”

Additionally, the program offers mental health and disability services for children, including screenings and referrals for suspected disabilities, and support for emotional and social development. There is a therapist on staff who can do play therapy. 

“It is a bigger program than just sending your child to preschool,” Pignotti said. “It is intended to help launch children successfully into kindergarten and be on level or above with their peers who didn’t attend Head Start. 

Head Start has been in operation since the 1960s, and in the early 2000s, the Early Head Start program was established. Nationally, Head Start serves 750,000 children a year. In Oregon, up to 6,500 children are being served. 

At the Wallace Road location, there are three classes that run. One of them goes year round, for about six hours a day. The other two offer morning and afternoon classes, September through June. Community Action also contracts out with child care providers to allow parents longer hours of care, up to ten hours in a day, and bilingual options so families can communicate comfortably in their home language. “We try to meet the community’s needs in a lot of different ways and really connect with families to offer what they need,” Pignotti said. 

The best part about this program? “There is never any cost for any Head Start services,” Pignotti said. “Even the families who get full time child care – there is no cost to them. It is free education and free childcare for qualified families. It really is amazing.” 

Families only have to qualify once for Early Head Start, where a child can enter care as early as six weeks old. When that child turns three and transitions into the Head Start program, the family would need to qualify again. “If a family stays eligible, they can be in our program for five years before they start kindergarten,” Pignotti said. “It’s more of a long-term relationship that we hope to build with families.”

Classes aren’t full yet at the Wallace Road location, so Pignotti encourages parents to apply, or visit the agency website, mwvcaa.org. Since this new location has been in operation, some people have commented on the set of stairs that seemingly go nowhere. Jones had a chuckle with that. “There is a stairway up off the sidewalk onto the parking lot level of the property, and they seem to be placed there out of nowhere. I sometimes jokingly refer to them as the stairway to nowhere because we didn’t intend to put those there, but we kind of had to.”

City code requires that there be access from the street level up to the property. Stairs were the cheapest option. “It was just a financial choice,” Jones said. “It was far, far cheaper to build a stairway up to the property. There had to be sidewalk access so that was the cheapest way we could do that to comply.”

Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action 

Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action | Salem, OR

503-585-6232