Newsom’s goal — ‘Reimagine public schools’
Budget plan expands transitional kindergarten to every 4-year-old
Digging deeper into a $75.7 billion surplus, Gov. Gavin Newsom continued his weeklong rollout of big ticket budget proposals on Wednesday with a plan to set up $500 college savings accounts for nearly 4 million children from low-income families and expand transitional kindergarten to every 4-year-old in California.
Newsom unveiled a $20 billion plan to “reimagine public schools” and reduce class sizes during a speech at Elkhorn Elementary in northern Monterey County.
“We are looking to transform, not go back to where we were, but to transform our educational system,” Newsom said.
Expected to face a recall vote in the fall, driven in part by anger over school and business closures in the pandemic, Newsom has been traveling around the state this week on a “California Comeback Tour” talking about $100 billion in spending from the revised budget plan he must submit by the end of the week. On Monday, he pledged another round of $600 stimulus checks for twothirds of Californians and on Tuesday more than $12 billion to tackle the state’s homelessness crisis.
The extra spending comes thanks to a massive windfall of tax revenues from a
buoyant stock market.
The governor’s office in a statement called Wednesday’s announcement “an unprecedented level of state school funding to better support the social-emotional well-being of students.”
Newsom said he was most excited about plans to establish $500 college savings accounts for every California student from a lowincome family who qualifies for federally subsidized school meals. Homeless and foster children would be eligible for an additional $500.
The accounts would be similar to the 529 education savings plans many families establish for their children to help them pay for college. It’s an idea Newsom had championed early in his political career. As San Francisco mayor, he
created a Kindergarten to College program in 2011 that gave all the city’s kindergarteners $50 to start a college savings fund.
The city says it was the first publicly funded universal children’s savings account program in the country.
“I had the privilege to open a 529 account, but not everybody can afford to open a 529 account,” Newsom said of his statewide savings plan proposal. “The vast majority of folks have never even heard of a 529 account.”
As many as 3.8 million California school children could be eligible for the accounts, which would be seeded with $2 billion from the state’s share of the American Rescue Plan stimulus bill President Joe Biden signed in March and $170 million from the state’s general fund after that.
California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson called
Newsom’s announced school spending Wednesday insincere, given his four children attend private schools that have been teaching in person while most of the state’s public school students were entirely or mostly “distance learning” online.
“Newsom continually siding with his teachers’ union allies over parents and children is the reason why California has the fewest reopened schools in America, and too many students are finishing a second school year of classes virtually,” Patterson said.
But Democratic lawmakers praised the move.
“The pandemic has devastated low-income communities of color,” said Assemblyman Miguel Santiago, D-Los Angeles, who has been working with other lawmakers on pending legislation for expanded transitional kindergarten.
Newsom’s $2.7 billion plan to expand access to
transitional kindergarten follows a proposal in his preliminary January budget.
Under the plan, transitional kindergarten for all will be phased in through the 2024-2025 school year. The proposal aligns with efforts in the legislature, where AB22 by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, would expand access to all 4-year-olds.
California created its transitional or pre-kindergarten program in 2010, but only one in four 4-year-olds, those with birth dates between Sept. 2 and Dec. 2, are currently eligible. An additional 266,000 4-yearolds would become eligible when universal transitional kindergarten, or TK, is fully implemented.
According to the AB22 fact sheet, a study by the American Institute of Research found that transitional kindergarten significantly improves kindergarten readiness, putting
children ahead of their peers who did not attend TK by up to six months in some academic skills. Low-income children and English learners show the greatest learning improvements, the study said.
Ted Lempert, president of the statewide nonprofit children’s advocacy program Children Now, said “it’s exciting the governor is committed to this,” but added that the details will be important and “we have to make sure it’s done right.”
Because of the need to get and train more teachers, the program will need to be phased in over the next few years, but Lempert said he would prefer to see that done based on economic need rather than children’s age. He added that it would help to have a simultaneous proposal to support child care providers, many of whom depend financially on 4-year-olds in their programs. And while Newsom
talked about reducing class sizes to 12, Lempert said it should be lower for transitional kindergarten.
According to Early Edge California, a Los Angelesbased nonprofit that advances policy changes to expand high-quality early learning programs, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin currently offer universal pre-kindergarten.
Early Edge California Executive Director Patricia Lozano said Newsom’s proposal would create “the biggest universal Pre-K program in the nation because of the number of kids who would be served.”
“This is a huge investment,” Lozano said. “There is evidence early learning is essential. So giving families more access to transitional kindergarten is super important.”