Not ‘universal’ in scope, Pre-K 4 SA serves as model
No, Pre-K 4 SA is not a “universal” preschool program for the city’s 4-yearolds.
Only about 8 percent of San Antonio’s 25,000 4-year-olds are enrolled in Pre-K 4 SA, the program championed by then-mayor Julián Castro. But you might not realize that when digesting news reports this week about Castro’s presidential campaign.
National commentators and journalists long have attached the adjective “universal” to the program that Castro championed as mayor in 2012, when he convinced voters to fund it with part of the city’s sales tax.
Like many progressive Democrats, Castro favors universal access to preschool as a national policy, and he referenced the city program in repeating that position at his presidential campaign announcement here Saturday, later tweeting, “As President, we’ll make Prek4USA happen — universal prekindergarten for all children whose parents want it, so that all of our nation’s students can get a strong start.”
Castro also retweeted an admirer’s assertion that as mayor he had “convinced business leaders and citizens that devoting a portion of their sales tax to fund universal PreK was a smart investment.”
The New York Times this week credited Castro with achieving a universal pre-K program with a local sales tax. The Washington Post also called it universal.
But only 2,050 children attended one of the program’s four preschool centers in the 2017-2018 school year.
Castro, who did not respond to a re-
quest for comment Wednesday, considers Pre-K 4 SA his signature program as mayor and called it one of his “proudest achievements” in a recently published memoir.
Run by a city-controlled nonprofit corporation, the program teaches kids from public school districts under partnership agreements that were approved by sometimes skeptical school boards, which augment the program’s revenues with state preschool dollars.
The city’s 1⁄8-cent-per- dollar sales tax still provides the bulk of its budget, which totaled more than $48 million last fiscal year.
The long-term goal is to have all of San Antonio’s 4-year-olds get high-quality preschool through their traditional public schools, charter networks, private schools and other venues, said Sarah Baray, the program’s CEO.
“What Pre-K 4 SA is about is creating a very high-quality model and then being able to replicate that in other programs,” Baray said.
To do that, PreK 4 SA also provides grants to help schools implement the high-quality curriculum it uses, and trains educators from partnering school districts.
Students taught at its four centers exceed the national norm in kindergarten readiness and the centers’ teachers demonstrate aboveaverage instructional quality, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, considered a definer of quality standards for early learning.
The program plans to distribute more than $8.5 million in competitive grants for the two school years ending in spring 2020. It gave about the same amount in the 2016-2018 school years, according to reports distributed to City Council members to show the impact in their districts.
The same reports show 656 educators and 110 campuses benefited in the first quarter of the 2019 fiscal year.
Pre-K 4 SA can’t provide an education to every 4-year-old at its four centers, but it does provide infrastructure to make other schools’ programs better, Baray said.
“We’re not universal. We lead with quality rather than access,” she said. “It’s better to have fewer seats that are high quality than more seats that are mediocre.”