Thousands of Colorado youngsters who qualify for preschool could be turned away when classes start this month because the state does not have enough money to cover the cost of their education.
The Colorado Department of Education does not maintain precise data on the number of qualifying 3- and 4-year-olds who are denied access because of funding constraints in the state’s preschool program or the federal Head Start program.
Still, the most recent estimates from the agency suggest that as many as 12,010 4-year-olds who were considered to be at-risk because of economic and social conditions had no preschool available to them through the Colorado Preschool Program or Head Start during the 2011-12 school year. That is about 17 percent of Colorado’s nearly 70,000 4-year-olds in 2012.
State education officials said an increase of 3,200 slots this school year for children in preschool and kindergarten is expected to offer some relief but not enough.
“There’s unmet need out there in that there are kids who would benefit, that is kids who are needy and at-risk, who don’t currently have access to slots,” Lt. Gov. Joe Garcia said. “What we’re trying to do is incrementally, when money is available, add to those slots by providing more resources to the school districts.”
At-risk children in Colorado who attend preschool perform better on the state’s standardized tests in math, reading and writing than children with similar backgrounds who do not participate in such programs, according to a 2013 legislative report produced by the Colorado Department of Education. The report suggests that both groups fall below statewide averages, but the gap is greater for those who did not attend preschool.
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>The state report tracked at-risk children who graduated from preschool in 2004 and found that by seventh grade, 62 percent were proficient or advanced in reading, which is 7 percentage points below the state average but 11 points above their at-risk peers who did not receive a state subsidy to attend preschool. In seventh-grade math, 44 percent of at-risk children who participated in the Colorado Preschool Program scored proficient or advanced on the state test. The percentage places them 12 points above their at-risk peers but 9 points below the state average.
“We have a lot of kids who show up for school for the very first time who are on dramatically unequal footing from their white or middle-class peers,” Garcia said. “It’s really unrealistic to expect that the K-12 system can fix all that by itself. We know that if we can do a better job of preparing these kids when they enter kindergarten, they’ll be more likely to be able to keep up with their more privileged peers.”
“Full potential”
State lawmakers started the Colorado Preschool Program in 1988 as part of an effort to “curb dropout rates, help children achieve their full potential, reduce dependence on public assistance, and decrease susceptibility to criminal activities.”
To qualify, children must come from low-income families or meet other criteria that includes a history of abuse or neglect in their family, homelessness, foster care, parents who did not graduate from high school, parental substance abuse or having a teen parent.
But Garcia said the challenge in Colorado, as in many other states, centers on finances.
State lawmakers have capped the number of children who can be served by the Colorado Preschool Program at 20,160, or 29 percent, of the state’s 4-year-olds. As a result, demand for the program generally exceeds the available slots, leaving districts with long waiting lists and the difficult task of telling parents that they do not have the space for their children.
Rebecca Behrendt was one of those parents. When the former middle school teacher moved from Nebraska with her family three years ago, the last thing she expected was how stressful it would be to find a preschool for her son, Henry.
“Henry was 2½ and it was the summertime,” Behrendt said. “I wasn’t thinking about it until I ran into another mom and she said, ‘You’ll be on this wait list and this wait list.’ I think I was more nervous for his preschool applications than I was for my college applications.”
Behrendt was crushed when Denver Public Schools officials told her they did not have enough space for her son, but she eventually found him a spot at a private preschool. This year, the Behrendts started making plans to get their daughter, Stella, in a private preschool until DPS told them that there was an opening.
Behrendt said because of her family’s income level, she will pay tuition at DPS, but that doesn’t matter because she is a strong believer in public school. Half-day preschool for a family of four in DPS ranges from $30 monthly for gross monthly income between $3,555 and $4,610 to $375 monthly for gross monthly income greater than $13,224.
The state’s school finance overhaul, which passed in May, would remove the cap so that all eligible children can have access to pre-kindergarten. The measure would also offer universal full-day kindergarten. But those changes are dependent on the passage of a $950 million tax hike, which is being proposed for the November ballot.
“As educators, we feel sad, but the current reality in Colorado is that it’s not possible to place every child in a classroom,” said Marcella Hoefner, the director of early-childhood programs in the Jefferson County School District.
Jefferson County, the state’s largest school district, had 2,529 children enrolled in its preschool program during the 2012-13 school year. About 814 children who were on a waiting list did not get into a preschool program in the district.
This fall, the district estimates that additional state dollars will allow it to enroll about 2,625 children, but officials said the funding will not cover the full demand for preschool programs. Hoefner estimated that between 600 and 800 children could end up on the district’s waiting list this year.
Preschool enrollment in Aurora Public Schools is expected to be 2,101 during the 2013-14 school year. The district already has a waiting list of 643 children.
“Our wait list increases throughout the year, and we anticipate as many as 800 to 900 on the waiting list by spring 2014,” spokeswoman Paula Hans said in an e-mail.
Added advantage
Some school districts have an added advantage because their voters approved tax increases to ramp up preschool availability and programs.
Voters in Denver Public Schools last year approved $13 million to improve early-childhood education programs and nearly $12 million to expand or build several early-childhood education centers. The local funding, along with business partnerships and state and federal dollars, will allow the district to serve an additional 550 children this year and an extra 300 preschoolers in 2014-15.
Still, DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said the district can’t serve all of the children who qualify for preschool.
District officials said they expect that 80 percent of families with 4-year-olds will want to enroll their children, leaving DPS about 300 slots short. But DPS could be up to 750 seats short if the district tried to offer preschool to all 4-year-olds within its boundaries who are living in poverty.
“We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of kids on wait lists over these last couple of years as we’ve sought to expand preschool, particularly in some of our highest poverty areas like southwest Denver,” Boasberg said. “I think that is morally wrong and educationally wrong to have families in poverty on wait lists for preschool.”
Nancy Cruz Ramos, a parent in southwest Denver, said she was initially told that her 4-year-old daughter, Jasmine Torres Cruz, would not be able to get into preschool at Castro Elementary School because the program was at capacity. Cruz Ramos said she fretted until the school district told her that her daughter could attend the Pascual LeDoux Early Childhood Education Center, a $5.5 million building funded with local tax money and opening this school year.
“They learn so much more in pre-K,” Cruz Ramos said. “I have a son who went to pre-K, and when he entered first grade, he was so far ahead of the children who did not go to preschool. He knew how to read and was very advanced. The children who didn’t go to pre-K didn’t know everything my son knew.”
Unmet needs
The Colorado Department of Education calculates the unmet need for pre-K with help from districts who self-report waiting lists, state pupil counts and additional data from the state demography office.
Education officials said those estimates consider only at-risk 4-year-olds who are eligible for the state-funded preschool, not all 3- and 4-year-olds in the state. The estimates also do not account for children who may already be in private preschool or in a high-quality day care that serves as a preschool.
According to a study released in April by the National Institute for Early Education Research, about 21 percent of Colorado 4-year-olds were enrolled in state pre-kindergarten in 2012, and only 6 percent of the state’s 3-year-olds were in a state preschool program.
Colorado received an additional $15 million in supplemental funding this year for early-childhood education from the federal government for efforts that include creating a highly qualified workforce for early-childhood education. The funding adds to the $30 million grant the state received in December through “Race to the Top: Early Learning Challenge.”
Garcia said the funding is just one step toward expanding preschool and kindergarten options in the state.
“I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that we can serve more kids with better-quality programs without devoting more resources to it,” Garcia said. “We have to understand that that investment is exactly that. It’s an investment that will pay off with greater high school graduation rates, greater college matriculation and graduation rates, and a stronger workforce.”
Zahira Torres
Numbers
17%
Colorado 4-year-olds considered to be at-risk who had no preschool available to them through the state program or Head Start in 2011-12
29%
State lawmakers’ cap on the number of 4-year-olds who can be served by the Colorado Preschool Program, or about 20,160 children
Author: Mile High Mamas
MG
70 million dollars isn’t enough…for pre-school?
Why does this state not know how to spend money efficiently? Think about the population growth and the money being spent on non citizens.
William
Well designed and run preschool programs have proven to be some of the most cost effective educational programs. Money that is focused on trying to fix the problem later like SB191 or common core standards is largely unproductive if not counterproductive. Improving funding allocations would be a great start to dealing with this problem rather than the old we need more money.
Mara
When is the standard to fund a program simply because it is well run? Legislators set priorities and to be frank — funding pre-school should never be a priority no matter how well run the programs are.
William
Giving the kids a good education is one means to help break this cycle of failure and poverty that some may view as valuable so they have something to whine about, but is really a drag on our society.
Educational policies that were drafted by those that seem to have not taken or failed education 101 place a financial burden on a public that is becoming increasing unwilling to pay for costly and ineffective educational practices.
While it seems like saying all kids should be able to read by third grade is a good idea just setting a standard does little to eliminate the causes for that failure. A clue about how to solve that problem was given a long time ago by a guy by the name of Piaget. He basically said that kids do not do things until they reach a certain cognitive readiness which has some relation to age. Further research has shown that readiness happens from both experiential development, which preschool can help provide, and biological neural development which comes from genetics and other factors such as nutrition.
So we need to find policy makers that know how to at least talk to people who know something. Further we need to prevent problems and not spend a lot of effort and money to fix them after the fact, which just increases the cost and reduces the level of the final desired outcome: that is a well educate and productive citizen.
Stacey
Preschools are not there to “raise children.” Kids in preschool get real educational enrichment, as evidenced by the superior performance of at-risk kids who attend them. They also get social interaction skills–they get used to being in school and learning–which is most critical for those kids who come from families that don’t have high educational backgrounds.
Aara
We are cutting our own throats when we don’t fund pre-school for all children.
Zoe
i’m on the fence with this. i think preschool is an awesome help for kids but don’t necessarily think it should be required or paid for by the government. but i’m sad for all those kids who thought they were going and aren’t.
Selma
When will we, as a nation, start making education one of our top priorities?!