Budget expands access to pre-k
Several Capital Region districts will receive grants to fund programs for the first time
Dozens of Capital Region school districts will soon be able to establish free childcare facilities for 4-year-olds with the help of funds in the 2021-22 state spending plan.
The enacted New York budget pumps $105 million into an expansion of universal pre-kindergarten in 210 districts in upstate New York and Long Island that don’t currently offer pre-school programs.
Universal Pre-kindergarten is a state grant-funded program to prepare 3- and 4-year-olds for kindergarten. Guilderland, Menands, East Greenbush, Shenendehowa, Schodack, and Bethlehem are among the districts that will get UPK grants for the first time this year, according to the state aid numbers released by the state Department of Education this week.
State education officials praised the
state’s investment in early education but raised concerns about the long-term sustainability of these new programs, which are largely funded by COVID -19 relief dollars.
“While the Regents have long supported increased funding for prekindergarten programs, we are concerned with the budget’s use of timelimited federal funds to support this increase and will continue to advocate for these programs to be fully funded with state dollars in the future,” Board of Regents Chancellor Lester Young and State Education Department Commissioner Betty Rosa said in a statement.
Pre-k funding has existed in the state in some form since the 1990s, but in 2014, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo vowed to universalize access to free, high-quality preschools across New York.
Currently, about 400 of more than 700 New York public school districts offer some form of parttime or full-time prekindergarten. While big city districts in New York City and Rochester have successfully made full-day pre-kindergarten available to all families who need it, access to free, full-time preschool in the rest of the state is patchy.
In the Capital Region, pre-kindergarten options in suburban and rural districts are particularly scarce. Across 11 regional districts, just 37 percent of 4-year-olds are served by state-funded preschool programs, according to state data.
Six districts in New York still do not offer full-time kindergarten, including Shenendehowa, which cites a lack of classroom space. Efforts to mandate full-time kindergarten legislatively have been unsuccessful.
Statewide, 34 percent of public school superintendents say their community’s preschool needs are being met by existing public and private programs, according to a survey conducted in August 2019 by the New York State Council of School Superintendents.
More than half of superintendents surveyed cite insufficient state funding as the largest hurdle to implementation of full-time early childhood programs in their districts, according to the poll, which sheds light on the haphazard implementation of New York’s universal pre-k push in recent years.
Roughly 77,000 4-yearolds across the state still lack access to state-funded pre-kindergarten programs, according to the Alliance for Quality Education. The advocacy group earlier this year warned that 2021’s pandemic-related budget cuts, which threatened to cut into districts’ state aid allocation, could pose an additional burden to universal pre-kindergarten programs.
The state’s investment in preschool education, plus its three-year commitment to reimburse districts for owed Foundation Aid — a formulabased aid that directs state dollars to districts with the greatest need — is a major victory for public school education, according to AQE policy director Marina Marcouo’malley.
“The Pre-k dollars included in the budget are an incredibly positive step in the right direction towards achieving ‘Pre-k for all’ in our state,” Marcou-o’malley said. “Combined with the childcare investment through federal dollars and the commitment to fully funding Foundation Aid within three years, we can begin to build a solid foundation for our children.”