Include 5-year-olds in the Head Start age range#8846
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45 CFR 1302.12(b) makes children eligible for Head Start preschool from age 3 up to compulsory school age, i.e. ages 3-5. The age_range scale cut off at 5, so income- and categorically-eligible 5-year-olds were excluded. Raise the upper threshold to 6 (ages 3, 4, and 5 eligible; 6 and older excluded) and update the boundary test accordingly. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per the partner contract-test gate (approved by Max): the two age-5 cases in analytics_coverage now expect eligibility, matching 45 CFR 1302.12(b). Team and partner notification in progress. Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Summary
45 CFR 1302.12(b) makes a child eligible for Head Start preschool if they are "at least three years old or, turn three years old by the date used to determine eligibility for public school" and "no older than the age required to attend school" — i.e., Head Start serves ages 3–5, up to compulsory school age. ACF describes the program as serving "children ages 3 to 5," and the parameter's own cited source (Atlanta Fed Policy Rules Database §2.1.8) uses ages 3–5.
PolicyEngine's
age_rangescale cut off at age 5 (threshold: 5 → falsefires at age ≥ 5), so the effective window was ages 3–4 only. Income- and categorically-eligible 5-year-olds were wrongly excluded.Changes
gov/hhs/head_start/age_range.yaml: raise the upper threshold from 5 to 6 (ages 3, 4, 5 eligible; 6+ excluded — 6 is the modal compulsory-attendance age and matches the program's 3–5 window without over-including 6-year-olds)is_head_start_eligible.yaml: the age-5 case that encoded the bug now expects eligible; the age-6 boundary case expects ineligibleEarly Head Start is unaffected (separate under-3 rule, verified consistent).
This change is partner-facing: two
analytics_coveragecases flip from $0 to ~$12,320 for age-5 children (head_start_child_age_5_age_out,head_start_size_2_single_parent_1_childinpartners/.../childcare/head_start/federal.yaml). Their expected outputs are updated in this PR after running the repo's partner-edit gate with Max (approved 2026-07-02); team/partner notification is in progress on Slack. All 78 partner childcare tests, 36 Head Start unit tests, and the partner signature suites pass locally.Sources
Found while triaging PolicyBench reference values (PolicyEngine/policybench#91): two income-eligible age-5 children (MT and NJ households) were scored as ineligible.
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