Afton Partners

How are Texas school districts using state pre-K funding to expand educational options for 3- and 4-year-olds? It depends where you look.  With just a few short months between the end of the legislative session and the first day of school, administrators had to tackle a catalogue of challenging tasks: hire enough teachers to meet spiking enrollment numbers, advertise the new options to parents living in district boundaries, consider transportation options, and make space in existing elementary schools or portable buildings. That was too much too soon for Frisco ISD, one of multiple school districts that could ask for a temporary waiver from offering full-day pre-K this year, because it doesn’t have enough space for extra classrooms. Lawmakers and advocates have encouraged school districts to partner with federal and private providers, including Head Start and local child care organizations, to increase the number of students they can serve and guarantee high-quality programs.

The government’s overall appropriation of funds for special education preschool programs has varied by year, but generally decreased between 2002 and 2015, from $390 million to $353 million, before getting a slight bump to about $368 million in 2016 and 2017. At the same time, the number of children served by the programs more than doubled from the early 1990s to 2017, when 753,000 children ages 3 to 5 were served. The growth in enrollment without adequate federal funding (for special education) means per pupil spending has decreased sharply, by 40 percent per child from 1994 to 2014. Without funds, states may struggle to offer a robust special education preschool program and services, which means kids who could greatly benefit from having a head start in school are missing out and losing valuable time to catch up with their peers.

While Afton recognizes that total federal preschool funding has increased substantially since 2008, this article points out the growth in special education Pre-K enrollment without adequate federal funding for Pre-K students with disabilities.

Though advocates hailed the additional $2.37 billion of federal child care funding in fiscal years 2018 and 2019 as “truly historic,” they are seeking more funding for the program, which still only serves about 1 in 6 eligible children. Early-education groups asked Congress for another $5 billion for fiscal 2020; House Democrats proposed adding about half of that, $2.4 billion next year. Long-term, it would probably take about $100 billion annually to cover every eligible child, said Jay Nichols, director of federal policy and government affairs at Child Care Aware of America, based on current spending and the number of eligible children served. Policymakers would also have to address widespread child care deserts, where providers simply aren’t available. To allow states to make more long-term plans, much of that funding should come from mandatory sources, meaning it wouldn’t be subject to congressional whims, he added.

As venture capitalists and private-equity firms continue to invest billions of dollars in education, they’re increasingly directing their funds to early childhood development, a long-neglected subset of the education population. Since 2016, government spending on early childhood programs has increased 17 percent and private capital has risen 12 percent, according to a panel of impact investors at SXSW EDU. On a larger scale, federal funding has grown 62 percent in the last decade…and state funding for preschools alone has increased 47 percent in the last five years.

The abrupt announcement that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel isn’t seeking re-election has raised questions about whether his sprawling initiative to implement free, universal pre-K will survive once he’s left office. While it’s unlikely a successor would oppose free pre-K outright, some education pundits said that at a time of fiscal strain, a post-Rahm mayor may question the expansion’s $175 million annual price tag. The city’s behemoth school district, Chicago Public Schools, is already spread thin, shouldering hefty debt, educator shortages, and a half-empty teacher pension fund.