This preschool in Alaska changed lives for parents and kids alike. Why did it have to close?

WASILLA, Alaska (AP) — She was a teenager, and the mother of a 2-year-old, when a knock came on the door of the trailer she called home. Two women were there to tell her about a federally funded preschool program called Head Start that was opening near her home in Chugiak. Would she be interested in enrolling her daughter?

Then pregnant with her second child, Kristine Bayne signed up. She hoped it would make a difference for her daughter. What she didn’t know: It would shift the trajectory of her life, too.

Bayne, who finished high school through correspondence courses after she got pregnant at 16, would go on to take a job with her child’s Head Start. Her confidence buoyed, she returned to school to earn a bachelor’s degree and a counseling certificate from the state. She would rise through the ranks of CCS Early Learning, the nonprofit that ran the region’s Head Start centers, and would retire as a family partnerships coordinator, lending the same kind of help to families that she and her husband received.

“I learned so much,” says Bayne, now 65. “How to take care of my children, how to advocate for them, how to have a voice for myself.… They take you where you’re at, and they help you move forward to become a better person.”

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