YONKERS, N.Y. — The only ones left in Room 5 at the Whitney Young Head Start Center are the two turtles thrashing around a small aquarium. The reading nook is empty. The CD player is silent.
After more than a dozen years, this federally funded center serving mostly Latino families closed its doors for good Friday, a victim of the federal budget cuts known as sequestration.
For its Spanish-speaking families, the center in the basement of a sooty housing project has taught their children English, fed them, provided medical care and prepared them to be ready for kindergarten without the academic deficits common among poor students.
“When I found out, for five nights I couldn’t sleep, thinking about it,” said Maireny Cammacho, a 33-year-old immigrant from the Dominican Republic whose two sons attended the center.
Federal sequestration has turned out to be less dire than predicted in many areas, as some agencies have found ways around the worst of the mandatory cuts. But for poor people who are heavily reliant on government social services, the cuts have had sharp and immediate effects. That is particularly true for Latinos.
Hispanics make up about 17 percent of the U.S. population but comprise a third or more of those who use federal housing subsidies, job training and other social programs that have been put under the sequestration knife.
In Head Start, about 23,000 Latino children ages 6 weeks to 5 years old have been dropped from the program because of the budget reductions, or a third of the total, according to estimates gleaned from federal data. Latinos also are heavily affected by cuts in money for public schools that teach poor children and those learning English as a second language.
“Not everyone is sharing proportionally in the pain of these budget cuts,” said Elizabeth Crocker, who directs a Head Start program and preschool program in a Latino neighborhood in Oakland, Calif., which is eliminating 39 of 608 slots.
In Denver, the Mi Casa Resource Center is losing 10 percent of its federal funding. The organization helps Latinos — primarily women — start or expand businesses. Last year, it assisted 650 businesses, from food trucks to cleaning services, that generated $10 million in overall revenue, executive director Christine Marquez-Hudson said. The cuts mean turning away people who are trying to become self-sufficient, she said.
“It’s just creating more social problems. Instead, we could be putting people to work,” she said.
Matt Barreto, a Latino politics expert at the University of Washington, said that “almost everyone saying the sequester didn’t seem so bad is an upper-middle-class professional, college-educated white person.”
