Hillary calls for doubling Early Head Start funding

Hillary Clinton on Monday called for doubling funding for Early Head Start and a similar grant program to improve services for low-income families with young children.

{mosads}At a YMCA in New Hampshire, an early-voting state in the presidential primary contest, Clinton broadly laid out a set of proposals that she said would help parents with young children.

“To make sure that parents get the support they need from the time their children are infants, I will double the Early Head Start Childcare Partnership grant program, which brings Head Start’s evidence-based curriculum into the childcare setting, to provide comprehensive, full day, high-quality services to low-income families,” Clinton said, according a transcript provided by the campaign.

The Democratic frontrunner, who held her first campaign rally on Saturday, said she would also want to double funding for Early Head Start, which she helped create when she served as first lady.

Early Head Start is a program operated by the federal government that seeks to provide child development and family support services to low-income families with infants or toddlers and pregnant women.

Clinton said she would back a middle-class tax cut “that can go toward helping parents pay for quality child care,” Bloomberg News reported.

She took aim at Republicans, arguing they’ve only been in favor of tax cuts that benefit hedge fund managers and oil companies.

“Republicans aren’t just missing the boat on early childhood education, they’re trying to sink it,” she said. “Republicans took care of those at the top and went after the kids.”

–This report was updated at 3:54 p.m.