Nash, Lola, 2006 April 12

Lola Nash set up the first Head Start Program in the United States in the Elm Haven neighborhood of New Haven. She was also one of the founders of the Edith B. Jackson family daycare center in New Haven and, in the 1980s, established a daycare at Yale New Haven Hospital to provide child care to nurses and other female employees. Before coming to New Haven, Nash cultivated a background in early childhood education by working in many diverse programs. She graduated from college in 1945 then worked for government-sponsored day care centers in New York City, a wartime program to allow mothers to labor in factories and other industries. She then traveled to Burma with her husband and home-schooled their children while teaching music to local children. After returning to the United States, she taught at public schools serving low-income communities in New York. She and her husband moved to New Haven in the 1960s because he was hired to set up alternative school programs. Nash was then asked to establish the Head Start program, which was funded as a pilot program and further supported by Ed Ziegler and the Yale Child Studies Center. She talks about her experiences there, her teaching philosophies, and Head Start's commitment to physical and emotional needs of children and their parents.

Interviewer: Sauer, Jordan