Florida families are still waiting for the high-quality pre-kindergarten they voted for
Since it began in 2002, the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) Scholarship has successfully provided lower-income students with greater access to additional public and private school options, growing from about 15,000 students in its first year to more than 107,000 today. This academic year, almost 22,500 Miami-Dade County students are using FTC scholarships to attend a school that better meets their needs.
Unfortunately, the demand for FTC scholarships is outpacing supply. Currently, there are more than 35,500 students who are eligible for FTC scholarships, but who do not have a scholarship because of insufficient funds. To help address this extraordinary demand, the Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis created the Florida Empowerment Scholarship (FES) this year. This helped, but this new scholarship program reached its capacity of 18,000 students within three months of becoming law.
Florida needs to serve more kids. Two MiamiDade families illustrate why.
Antonio Pollock didn’t want to send his son, Antonio Jr., to his zoned public school. It was in a rough neighborhood, and he feared the kindergartner wouldn’t receive the individual attention he thought his son needed.
Antonio Jr. already was enrolled in New Jerusalem Christian Academy in the state’s VPK program, which is free. It made sense for him stay at the school for kindergarten, but that would require tuition that Pollock couldn’t afford.
“When I told him he might have to leave school, he was crushed,” Pollock said, “so that’s when I had to look into the scholarship program.”
Pollock feared that his application for the scholarship was too late in the process for his son to be eligible. But Pollock says he was “ecstatic” when he received a scholarship award letter that made it possible for Antonio Jr. to stay in his preferred school.
At New Jerusalem, Antonio Jr. can indulge his love for singing, acting and dancing. His father says when his son sees his clothes laid out for school each day he gets super excited.
Kadine Smith wasn’t as fortunate getting a scholarship. She and her son Aiden, 13, moved to Miami from New York in 2018. She struggled to find the right school for him. They tried a charter school that was recommended, but it was an hour away from their home and a poor cultural fit for Aiden.
“It was a good school, just not for him,” Smith said.
Aiden then went to live with his father, who was in closer proximity to a different charter school. These changes caused Aiden to become withdrawn and extremely stressed. Smith moved Aiden back with her and found a private school, Holy Cross Lutheran, that was near her home and provided a better environment.
Smith and her son, now an eighth-grader, are happy at Holy Cross. It’s a small community school with a curriculum with which Aiden is familiar. Smith likes the principal and says the teachers are very good.
However, financial barriers remain. The school told Smith about the FTC, but by the time her application was approved there were no scholarship funds available for Aiden. In order to come up with the tuition funds to keep her son in school, Smith had to sell her car. She now takes the bus or walks to get where she’s going.
Smith shrugs off the inconvenience.
“It’s not really a sacrifice. It’s an investment,” she said. “It’s important for Aiden to get a good education.”
Nevertheless, Smith desperately wants a scholarship so she can keep Aiden in a school that works best for him. Plus, she says, she might even be able to begin saving up to buy another car.
To ensure families like Smith’s have the same education options as Antonio Pollock’s, the Florida Legislature should allow the FES program to serve more students. No child’s future should be put on hold.
Undeniably, we didn’t really get what we voted for. In 2002, the people of Florida overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment that promised to make high-quality pre-kindergarten available and free for all 4-year-olds in the state. Those two words, “high-quality,” appear twice in the amendment. Florida’s voluntary pre-kindergarten (VPK) program began in 2005. Today, we are one of only four states to offer free pre-kindergarten to all 4-year-olds. We serve almost three-quarters of all 4-year-olds in the state, spending more than $400 million each year.
Yet we still haven’t fulfilled that promise of “high quality.” Yes, there are some great programs, many of the highest quality. But if you are spending the people’s money — our money — every program must be high quality because we know that only that sort of quality brings real results for children. And we are not yet getting the results we should.
Florida’s “kindergarten readiness rate” stands at a paltry 53 percent. That means almost 90,000 children are already behind when they enter our K-12 system. Gov. Ron DeSantis is aware and concerned. So is Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran. And The Children’s Movement of Florida has said, for years now, that access to high-quality early learning leads to better outcomes for children and a more prosperous future for our state.
The research tells us that young children’s brains are built through back-and-forth interactions. A high-quality preschool program’s first mission is not the mastery of letters and numbers, but rather begins with learning to listen, to communicate, to ask questions, to manage emotions, to cooperate, to hold a pencil.
A genuine high-quality VPK program would have standards that are developmentally appropriate and measured in a way that incentivizes the best teaching practices. Today, Florida’s preschool classrooms are not measured by how teachers interact with students and guide their learning, but instead by an assessment of what they know.
We have an opportunity this legislative session to make a change. House Bill 1013, filed by Rep. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, and Senate Bill 1688, by Sen. Gayle Harrell, RStuart, would require the Florida Department of Education to develop uniform standards of quality. They call for measuring programs based on the effectiveness of their teacher-child interactions and the learning gains children make during the school year.
This legislation also would provide parents timely information about the quality of VPK providers and about their child’s development, giving them the best possible chance to make the best choices for their children.
Moreover, fully integrating early-learning programs under Florida’s Department of Education, also would lead to streamlined policies that serve children before kindergarten and through to reading proficiency by grade 3. Making sure every child has the best possible chance to succeed is a matter of giving children the start on skills that they will need to succeed in school and in life.
This is all within our grasp to do. It should have been done years ago. It needs to be done now.