GOAL: UNIVERSAL PRESCHOOL BY ’24
Board approves plan to put the district on path to a high-quality early education program
NORTH HOLLYWOOD » With the goal of making sure all young children have access to a high-quality early education program, the Los Angeles Unified school board voted unanimously on Wednesday to put the district on a path toward providing universal preschool by 2024.
As an initial step, school board members also announced that the district will expand its transitional and early transitional kindergarten programs starting this fall.
Access to high-quality early education in Los Angeles was inadequate long before the coronavirus pandemic, but the public health crisis laid bare the need for such programs, school board President Kelly Gonez said dur
ing a news conference at Arminta Early Education Center in North Hollywood. About 3 million women nationwide have left the workforce since the pandemic, often to care for their children, said Gonez, the mother of two young children.
“As we begin to recover from this devastating pandemic, we owe it to our communities and our children to get this right,” said Gonez, the lead sponsor of a resolution the board approved later Wednesday to expand early education in the district. “Universal preschool in Los Angeles would transform the educational experiences and life outcomes of generations to come. We simply cannot afford to wait.”
Research shows that the first five years of life are critical for brain development, and children with access to early education tend to be more successful academically. It also helps with their socialemotional development, educators say.
“Some skills, they can learn at home, but there’s some skills that they have the opportunities here at school to learn and grow from,” said Kevin Aceituno, a special education teacher at the Arminta center. Skills such as sharing, waiting for one’s turn and using words to articulate one’s feelings must be learned, he said.
“We can model as teachers and then have the students practice with each other,” he said. “It’s really important for them to start at an early age because that’s when the mind is absorbing everything.”
LAUSD currently serves about 20,000 children through its early education programs, but the demand far exceeds the number of available seats, district officials said. Tens of thousands more children who already qualify for the district’s programs — such as low-income students, those who are homeless and those with learning disabilities — would have access to early education if the district could expand the number of available spots, and on top of those students, tens of thousands more children not in the targeted populations could benefit from universal preschool, Gonez said.
It’s unclear at this point how much it would cost to provide universal preschool once the program is built out, but expanding the early transitional kindergarten program in the fall alone is estimated to cost $5 million to $7 million, the board president said.
The district is expecting up to about $5.2 billion in one-time COVID-19 relief funding from the state and federal government. Beyond that, both President Joe Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom and their administrations have expressed interest in allocating more dollars toward early learning, she said.
“There’s already momentum and desire to invest in early childhood education at all levels of government. … So we have to be at front of this effort; we have to be proactive to ensure that we can take advantage of those resources and meet the needs of all of our families,” Gonez said.
The board resolution, which passed by a vote of 7-0, directs district staffers to return in 180 days with a plan for implementing universal preschool by the 2024-25 school year in an equitable manner based on student needs. The programs should include professional development opportunities for teachers, partnerships with licensed community and homebased centers and culturally and linguistically responsive family engagement.
The board also directed the superintendent to prioritize the expansion of transitional and early transitional kindergarten programs using anticipated COVID-19 relief funds for the 2021-22 school year and the reopening of early education centers that had previously closed by the 202425 academic term.
And at the request of board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, the board added a clause to the resolution before voting on it that, longterm, the district will explore opportunities to offer early education to the children of LAUSD employees. The request was prompted by recent concerns raised by teachers that they were forced to return for in-person work while child care options have become more scarce or less affordable during the pandemic.
A representative for United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing LAUSD teachers and other certificated employees, called universal preschool in L.A. a “game changer.”
“Let’s heal our current preschool system, which is expensive, largely privatized and uneven in terms of instructional quality,” Julie Van Winkle, secondary vice president with UTLA, said during Wednesday’s news conference. “Historically, low-income communities and communities of color have struggled to access high-quality preschool, and preschool at all for that matter.”
Board member Jackie Goldberg, a co-sponsor of the board resolution, said the United States is the only industrialized nation to not offer free early education to every child.
“I do not believe we can close the achievement gap without free opportunities for every single child, starting at 3 years old,” she said.
The resolution the board adopted also calls on district staff to seek out possible funding streams and to advocate at the legislative level in support of proposed bills that support early education.