The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Edward Zigler, Head Start founder, dies at 88
NORTH HAVEN — Edward F. Zigler, who developed the nationwide Head Start early-learning and child-development program in 1965, died Thursday at the age of 88.
At the time, Zigler was director of the Yale Child Study Center. He became known as the “Father of Head Start” after helping develop a pilot program as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty.
The program’s goals were to give young children the skills they needed to succeed in elementary school, as well as social, psychological and emotional support to them and their families. Head Start since has helped more than 35 million children succeed in school and in life.
“He was one of the first people … in academia who felt that we should take the science we have and give it away … and make a better world for children and families,” said Walter Gilliam, director of the Edward Zigler Center in Child Development and Social Policy in New Haven, which Zigler founded in 1978 to bring child development and public policy experts together to the benefit of both.
Zigler was born March 1, 1930, in Kansas City, Mo., to parents who had immigrated from Poland and spoke only Hebrew and Yiddish. He earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958 and taught at the University of Missouri for one year before joining the psychology faculty at Yale University in 1959. He served as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
“Before then he was also a child whose family was receiving services through the immigrant settlement homes,” including health and dental care, meals and social supports, Gilliam said, and he sold fruit “out of the back of a horse-drawn wagon.” When he was named to the Project Head Start committee “he wanted to give poor children in the United States the type of support that he received,” Gilliam said.
Gilliam said Zigler was the last surviving member of the Head Start planning committee. “The reason he was the last one is that he was so young,” he said. “He was 35 at the time.”
Zigler went on to start Early Head Start for infants and toddlers and a program for migrants and “ended up advocating for lots of programs that we’ve had for a long time,” Gilliam said. He served as an adviser to every president from Johnson to Barack Obama.
Yale President Peter Salovey, whose academic field also is psychology, issued a statement saying, “Ed Zigler was my mentor, teacher, and friend. His work has been inspirational to me and many others in my field, and his influence well beyond our field has been profound. He was a fine example of how science and policy can join hands for the benefit of many.”
Peg Oliveira, executive director of the Gesell Institute of Child Development, said that “what really struck you when you met Ed was that he not only had a deep understanding for child development, but that he had a passion for helping children in need and that passion came through in an urgency to do this work better than we were doing it.”
Oliveira said Zigler was “a staunch advocate for high-needs children” who came from poverty or who were “undergoing trauma and toxic stress. He knew that the environment mattered long before we had … studies that proved that it mattered.” She said he wanted to give children the best chance possible “to learn and, more importantly, to thrive.”
Zigler served in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, where he created the U.S. Office of Child Care and started Healthy Start and Home Start programs “that would support the full development of children, understanding that that would impact their ability to learn once they reached school,” Oliveira said.
During that time, Zigler championed the 1971 Comprehensive Child Development Bill, which would have offered child care to all families on a sliding fee scale. However, Nixon vetoed the bill.
Zigler was the first director of the U.S. Office of Child Development, now the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, and former head of the U.S. Children’s Bureau. He developed the Education for Parenthood project, a national parenting-education program for high school students.
He also oversaw the resettlement of children of Operation Babylift, the mass evacuation of more than 3,000 infants and children, many of them children of U.S. troops, after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Zigler’s expertise included applied developmental psychology, social and emotional development, developmental psychopathology, intellectual disabilities and public policy. He published more than 800 scholarly articles and 43 books and monographs, according to a news release from Yale.
“The prolific scientific and public service contributions of Dr. Zigler are the pillars upon which so many current early childhood development programs are built, and his work at the Yale Child Study Center helped New Haven educators — and their counterparts nationwide — understand the need for wraparound services for children who have experienced trauma in their young lives,” Mayor Toni Harp said in a statement. “Similarly, Dr. Zigler set standards and helped win widespread acceptance for early learning and preschool programs as precursors for student success later on.”
“Last night, New Haven lost a legendary figure — and the world lost a force for good,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3, in a statement. “Ed was a dear friend whose counsel I relied on over the years to inform my work in Congress. He was a giant in the field of social policy for children — a teacher, researcher, and mentor to the people who will carry on his work.”
DeLauro said Zigler also had an influence on the Family and Medical Leave Act. “At every step, he strived and succeeded in making the lives of countless children better because he understood children could not be separated from the context of family and community,” DeLauro said. “Through boundless wisdom, Ed charted a vision for how to best help children and families that shaped child nutrition, health, injury prevention, and so much more. His impact spanned decades, and will last well into the future.”
Zigler was predeceased by his wife, Bernice Zigler, in 2017. He is survived by his son, Perrin Scott Zigler, dean of the School of Drama at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a sister, Maurine Agron of Kansas City, Missouri, and two granddaughters.
Services will be private. The family asked that donations be made to a local Head Start program or other program that supports children’s health and wellbeing. Events to honor the life and contributions of Zigler are being planned for the spring, with additional information to follow.