Jule Meyer Sugarman (September 23, 1927 – November 2, 2010) was an American public administrator who founded Head Start and led the program for its first five years.
His studies were cut short by World War II, in which he served in the United States Army as a staff supply sergeant in Japan.
[2] Sugarman, described by Edward Zigler as an "administrative genius", served as the executive secretary of the 13-member planning panel that was commissioned by Lyndon Johnson to create Head Start as part of the War on Poverty.
The team included specialists in education, pediatricians and psychologists who designed a program aimed at ending the cycle in which children become "inheritors of poverty's curse".
Sugarman took over as head of the program from Julius B. Richmond, the original holder of that post, when Richmond became ill.[1] Following the advice of Sargent Shriver of the Office of Economic Opportunity "to write Head Start across this land so that no Congress or president will ever destroy it", Sugarman oversaw the immediate increase of enrollment in the program to more than double the projected number of participants, starting with 560,000 children in the first year versus a target of only 250,000.