The Trump administration is proposing a sweeping overhaul of Head Start that would largely relinquish federal control of the early learning program for low-income babies, toddlers and preschoolers.

Head Start was established in the 1960s to help fight poverty and has long been considered by early childhood education experts to be a gold standard. The changes, which must undergo a 60-day public comment period before they are finalized, are the latest in a string of attempts by the administration to alter the program, which has been a target of conservative thinkers calling for its elimination.

Standards, such as the number of children a teacher can supervise, would soon be under local control, leading to variations across the country. At the same time, the administration is proposing additional regulations, including one that would require most children to be taught only in English.

Officials say the proposed plan, which reduces more than 100 pages of regulations to just 10, will reduce costs while allowing providers to serve more children.

Alex Adams, head of the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees Head Start and is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters in a call on Wednesday that the proposed changes would “not make any of those programs operate differently.”

A cap on “administrative overhead” would go down from 15% to 5%, producing $2.2 billion in savings that federal officials said would allow Head Start to serve up to 236,000 more children.

But critics of the changes said that local Head Start programs will struggle with the loss of administrative staffing and other items currently included in the overhead, increasing pressure for them to diminish their offerings or, in some cases, close altogether.

“It fundamentally undoes what makes Head Start Head Start,” said Donna Sneeringer, president of the Child Care Resource Center, a nonprofit that serves 2,300 children in northern L.A. County through Head Start. “There is not a clear understanding that this is a comprehensive poverty alleviation program, not just a child-care program.”

At the same time that the administration is stepping back from regulating Head Start, it will expand the program’s nutrition and health rules, including a requirement that children engage in 30 minutes of physical activity for every 3.5 hours of classroom instruction.

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Nationwide, Head Start serves just over 700,000 children and is funded at $12.4 billion annually, a level that Adams said the Trump administration intends to maintain this fiscal year. California providers receive $1.5 billion annually in federal Head Start funding, serving 84,000 children across the state.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., head of the Department of Health and Human Services, affirmed the importance of Head Start, which his uncle, Sargent Shriver, helped launch.

“It’s a program that works for the most vulnerable, the poorest kids in our society, and it’s really important we protect it,” Kennedy said in the Wednesday media call.

Critics fear that required administrative cuts and rising costs could force Head Start providers to reduce services such as medical screenings and outreach to parents. The new regulations, including the nutrition and health requirements and the shift from dual language programs to English-only instruction, would also put a strain on budgets.

Councils made up of parents and community members, which currently have a say in decision-making, would be largely diminished to an advisory role.

“I think there will be a lot of competing priorities that may move us away from that whole child, whole family approach that Head Start currently provides,” said Luis Bautista, executive director of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which is California’s largest Head Start grantee.

Eligibility for Head Start largely remains unchanged, though additional documentation will be required for parents who are unemployed or homeless, affecting roughly 8% of enrolled children.

Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, worries that even in California, where licensing requirements are stricter than in many other states, providers will face pressure to eliminate services rather than reduce enrollment.

“We’ll see that those kids are not getting the true head start this program was intended to give them,” she said.

Stacey Scarborough, the Early Head Start director at Venice Family Clinic, said she will try to maintain current standards, including education requirements for staff.

“I think everyone wants to continue the quality, have the good outcomes and results that we have,” Scarborough said.

In May, the Trump administration proposed rescinding a Biden-era plan to increase wages and benefits for Head Start workers. In an order that was later rescinded, the administration attempted to freeze funding for the program. It also moved to restrict eligibility based on immigration status, which was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, and consolidated Head Start’s regional offices, attempting to lay off scores of workers. Last year, a document from the Trump administration that proposed eliminating Head Start was leaked, but the proposal ultimately was scrapped.

“The changes that they’re making are really about promoting their own ideological agenda,” said Jennesa Calvo-Friedman, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. “They’re certainly not based on evidence of what works best for children and families.”

Policy analysts at conservative think tanks have long considered child care the responsibility of the states, saying that overarching federal regulations do not create enough flexibility.

Colleen Hroncich, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said that local control will give parents and communities more say in how their children are educated.

“When the states are designing these programs, it’s a lot easier for our constituents to weigh in on them than at the federal level,” she said.

This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children, from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.