Sunday, February 10, 2008
The pre-K promise
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
Pre-K kids go on to better, more productive lives.
Research shows a dramatic impact.
Virginia should invest heavily in preschool, particularly for at-risk 4-year-olds. Few dispute that the investment, if made wisely, would pay for itself many times over and spread benefits broadly throughout society.
The state already spends a little more than $46 million a year on what is called the Virginia Preschool Initiative for 4-year-olds, but Gov. Tim Kaine wants it to do more. A key pledge in his successful run for office was to extend access to pre-kindergarten to all 4-year-olds whose parents wanted them to participate.
State revenue shortfalls have forced Kaine to pare his promise, and he now wants to expand the preschool initiative, which targets at-risk children who are not served by the federal Head Start program.
All 4-year-olds benefit from early childhood learning experiences, but the greatest gains are to be made by the least-advantaged.
The case for funding is a simple one of more is less in terms of dollars and cents: more now, less later. Study after study has shown that at-risk children who attend high-quality, center-based pre-kindergarten are far more likely to go into kindergarten ready to learn. Later, they are less likely to repeat a grade, need remedial help or special education, or to drop out of school.
None of this should be news to Virginia lawmakers now pondering Kaine's budget request for $56.8 million over the next two years to add 7,000 more at-risk 4-year-olds to the Virginia Preschool Initiative. The plan is to expand the program by 17,000 children by 2012. The General Assembly last year commissioned a study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission that confirmed educators' accepted wisdom: Children who participated in the preschool initiative as 4-year-olds scored significantly better than their classmates on literacy assessments in kindergarten.
Elementary school principals and kindergarten teachers could add that preschool kids are better prepared socially, too.
Breaching barriers
Still, in a tight budget year some lawmakers are skeptical of spending more to expand on that success. They can point to the fact that localities don't use all of the Virginia Preschool Initiative funding the state offers now to argue against adding any.
The benefits of high-quality pre-K are so great, though, legislators should be looking for ways to help communities use all of the available money and more.
Virginians shouldn't be hunkering behind the barriers to pre-K, but pushing them down.
Some barriers are systemic, stymieing entire localities. Some barriers more narrowly affect individual families, discouraging them from taking advantage of the opportunities their locality offers.
Kathy Glazer, executive director of the Governor's Working Group on Early Childhood Initiatives, said some localities don't have the critical mass of eligible 4-year-olds to begin the program. Some have plenty of prospective students, but the localities can't afford to participate at all or as fully as they might.
The preschool initiative is paid for with a mix of state and local funding, but the local share is not equal across the commonwealth. The split is based on a locality's composite index, a measure of wealth used in education funding formulas to determine how much of every dollar will come from the state and how much from the locality.
In Alexandria, Glazer noted, the composite index is 0.8, meaning the state chips in 20 cents and the locality 80 cents of every pre-K dollar. And in Northern Virginia, where the cost of living is high, the program is more expensive, hitting those localities with a double-whammy.
Where the local share is very high, Glazer said, the state proposes to foot 50 percent of the cost for pre-K if Kaine's budget increases survive.
Roanoke's composite index, by contrast, is .37, meaning its public school system pays about one-third of the cost of its Virginia Preschool Initiative program. The city enrolled 443 children this school year and could have had state funding for 81 more. The shortfall wasn't blamed on lack of funding.
Rather, school officials talk about needing to do better recruitment: more outreach and parent education.
Some localities, such as Roanoke County, simply don't have space in their schools to offer preschool to as many children as they could.
And interviews with other players in the region's complex web of advocates for and providers of early childhood services cite barriers for parents that can be lumped under one word: poverty.
The length of the school day -- five hours -- doesn't work for some parents who go to jobs or school. Some day care centers offer after-school pick-up, but not all families are able to choose that option.
Stuck in the middle
Wealthier parents can pay for private day care, the poorest are eligible for child-care subsidies out of various federal and state funding pots. But qualifying for the help doesn't mean parents necessarily get it. Jane Conlin, Roanoke's director of social services, said, "There's rarely enough to pay for everybody who needs it."
And between the two ends of wealthiest and neediest are people in the middle who are too poor to pay the cost but not poor enough to get the assistance.
Kaine proposes to at least begin clearing some of these barriers by developing more partnerships between private preschools and the state program. Last year, the General Assembly funded a one-year Virginia Preschool Pilot Initiative that is under way in 10 localities. As of Oct. 26, an added 265 at-risk children were being served in nonprofit, for-profit, faith-based and Defense Department early learning centers.
The pilot site closest to Roanoke is Alleghany County, which already had contracted with the local YMCA to run two Virginia Preschool Initiative classes for 4-year-olds, one in Low Moor and one in Covington. The school system could not afford the required local match, said Mary Jane Mutispaugh, supervisor of instruction for county schools. "In Alleghany County, that comes primarily from the Alleghany Foundation," a private foundation.
Head Start also was doing some home-based, one-on-one preschool instruction in the county, and needed classroom space.
"We knew we had more kids we needed to serve," Mutispaugh said. So Head Start joined the collaborative, which applied for the pilot grant. Now Head Start pays tuition to the Y. And, by braiding federal, state and private local money, the program has doubled its capacity for 4-year-olds by adding two classes at the Low Moor site.
"One of our biggest hurdles was trying to work out the funding streams," Mutispaugh said, but there are others: the paperwork, the push for accountability and results, staffing. The Alleghany Highlands YMCA program requires preschool teachers to have a bachelor's degree with training in early childhood education. Paraprofessionals have to have preschool certification.
"We're fully staffed," Mustispaugh said. "But the pay is not as much as if they were working for a public school. Often the teachers will end up going to the public school, and we have to find another teacher."
The bottom line for her, though? "I feel like we're better serving the kids who need to be served."
Reliable funding
The state hired Virginia Tech to evaluate the pilot. Its interim report in December, after about two months of operation, said early indicators appeared encouraging, though it identified some challenges.
The biggest: "For the pilot initiative to be sustainable, virtually all collaborative stakeholders agreed that some form of reliable state funding would be necessary. Further, most identified the current local match requirements, calculated as a function of the composite index, as a barrier to increased capacity at the current time. It appears that these factors will have to be addressed in any future planning for pre-kindergarten expansion."
In Hampton, an urban school district, the public schools have built on established partnerships with a private, nonprofit day care center and a nonprofit community action agency to expand the state preschool program to seven pilot sites. These include the New Mount Olive Christian Academy, Langley Air Force Base and Hampton University.
Valencia Lewis, director of early childhood education for the city schools, said a main benefit of the pilot program has been improved quality at the day care sites.
"Our pilot friends receive the same kind of professional development, as much as we can. They [otherwise] don't have the funding and ability to receive training, curriculum and supplies."
Another plus is the relationships built between nonpublic and public schoolteachers. "It's more than the dollars and cents."
She acknowledged the administrative workload is heavy. "The finance piece is a huge, huge piece when you're trying to coordinate everybody's needs and how that's done. Verifying purchases by pilot sites; if we're making purchases for them, they have to follow the same rules as city schools. Getting checks cut, materials, supplies -- it's just a lot."
Lewis hopes the expansion will go forward, though.
"We keep the focus of the end result," she said. "What effect is it going to have on the kids and the families? It's a positive one. The pluses far outweigh the things we have to work through, the challenges."
Funding is by far the biggest of the challenges for expanded pre-K in Virginia. If lawmakers focus on the future, the money barrier can be overcome.
Strother is on the editorial board of The Roanoke Times.
