Head Start was started as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and Great Society. It was modeled on the Little School of the 400. The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 had a single line authorizing program, and the Act gave broad powers to the Office of Economic Opportunity, which began the program. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 also addressed preschool education.
The Office of Economic Opportunity's Community Action Program launched Project Head Start as an eight-week summer program in 1965. The project was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs. The following year it was authorized by Congress as a fully-funded year-round program. In 1981, the Head Start Act was passed.
Head Start was then transferred to the Office of Child Development in the Department of Welfare (later the Department of Health and Human Services) by the Nixon Administration in 1969. Today it is a program within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the HHS. In FY 1995, the Early Head Start program was established to serve children from birth to three years of age in recognition of the mounting evidence that the earliest years matter a great deal to children's growth and development. Programs are administered locally by non-profit organizations and local education agencies such as school systems. Head Start is a program for children age 3 to 5 in the United States.