More middle-class children in Pre-K 4 SA envisioned
Even as San Antonio’s early education choices have improved dramatically, thousands of families that can’t afford private preschool make too much income to qualify for the city’s rapidly expanding menu of public school options.
Becca Murillo should know. Two years ago, with her toddler son Hugo in tow, she crossed school district boundaries in search of something high-quality and affordable.
She and her husband, a middle school teacher, didn’t qualify for free preschool under the state’s income criteria. Her neighborhood school in Judson Independent School District didn’t offer full-day prekindergarten at the time. And Murillo couldn’t get Hugo into Pre-K 4 SA, the popular city-funded program.
Murillo signed up for a couple of lottery systems in other schools but wasn’t selected. She turned to private schools and was hit with sticker shock.
“I was unable to find high-quality preschool options at an affordable price. We couldn’t make it work,” Murillo said.
So Hugo stayed home the next year, becoming one of the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 San Antonio 4-yearolds whose families annually find themselves caught in the middle.
they need it just as much as everybody else,” said Sarah Baray, the CEO of Pre-K 4 SA.
The early childhood education landscape in San Antonio has rapidly expanded since the creation of Pre-K 4 SA in 2013 — and is growing even more thanks to additional funding that a new state law provides school districts for full day pre-K.
Murillo has seen the options expand since she started looking in 2017 and is hopeful that this year’s pursuit for preschool for her younger daughter, Lyra, will be more successful.
About 10,500 families in San Antonio, or about 40 percent of the city’s 4-year-olds, do not qualify for state-funded pre-K, according to a Pre-K 4 SA study last year. Some of those families can afford high-quality private schooling, but researchers feel confident that “very solidly 3,000” and as many as 5,000 cannot, Baray said.
So how, she wondered aloud, can her program partner with child development centers and school districts to “make space available for the children that don’t have access right now because they don’t qualify for highquality public pre-K and their families can’t afford it?”
The answer she foresees involves gradually serving more of the middle class in her own program’s centers. The change has already started.
Branching out
On the first day of school last August, families clustered in the remodeled hallway of Gardendale Pre-K 4 SA Early Learning Program, the former Gardendale Elementary School. While 4-yearold Kasie Sandoval removed her brand-new backpack, parents Antonio and Keyla watched on the other side of newly installed observation windows. Other parents crowded around the glass to take pictures of their kids adjusting to a new environment.
Pre-K 4 SA is funded mainly by a share of the city sales tax, the renewal of which will go before voters next year. It teaches 2,000 students in four model centers and gets some state funding under a pass-through arrangement with the local school districts where they live. But this year the program also is running Gardendale, a freshly painted site in Edgewood ISD, in a partnership that’s converting it to an early childhood learning center.
New materials were brought in to replicate Pre-K 4 SA classrooms, and it will eventually serve only grades pre-K through second. Any family in Bexar County can send kids there, with those in Edgewood getting prioriside ty.
Baray approached other school districts and got no takers, but she sees such partnerships as a way Pre-K 4 SA can teach more students whose household incomes fall in the middle. As more families are attracted to highquality programs in their own school districts, more spaces at the city program’s model centers will open up for those too affluent to qualify for free pre-K to pay its sliding-scale tuition, Baray said.
The numbers of students whose parents pay some tuition have increased from about 200 when the city program started to about 500 today, Baray said.
In 2012, when voters approved the sales tax that created Pre-K 4 SA, only a few area school districts offered full day pre-K, sometimes by using their state pre-K funding to extend federal Head Start programs or by augmenting state and federal dollars with their own general funds. Now, 11 Bexar County traditional public school districts have fullday programs.
Some have responded to the demand with significant investments. In Southside ISD, for example, voters approved a $59.75 million bond, about $30 million of which was used to construct Menchaca Early Childhood Center, a state-of-the art campus that opened this year.
And parents are flocking to the schools. Before this year, North“But ISD served roughly 1,000 of its 4-year-olds in a combination of half-day and full-day programs supplemented with Head Start and the slots it had available at the Pre-K 4 SA centers. This year, with full-day pre-K installed in 70 of its 79 elementary campuses, Northside is teaching 3,200 of its 4-year-olds. The district hired about 40 additional teachers to meet the need, district spokesman Barry Perez said.
“Folks want a full-day program,” Northside Superintendent Brian Woods said. “What I think is going to happen is, when we look at pre-K enrollment two years from now, you’re going to see this really dramatic increase across the state, and I think that’s a really good thing, for so many reasons.”
But it has to be high quality to have an impact, Baray has often said, an argument backed by experts at the National Institute for Early Educational Research (NIEER) at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Education in New Jersey.
“If you have access without the quality, it really doesn’t mean anything,” researcher G.G. Weisenfeld said this month when discussing Pre-K 4 SA’s second consecutive “gold medal” given by the NIEER in its annual report assessing early childhood education programs in the country’s 40 largest cities.
NIEER sets 10 benchmarks for high-quality preschool: early learning and development standards; teachers who have at least a bachelor’s degree; teachers who have specialized training in pre-K; assistant teachers with a child development associate credential or equivalent; professional development and coaching for staff; class sizes of 20 students or less; a 1-to-10 staff-to-child ratio or better; vision, hearing and health screenings and referrals for kids; curriculum supports; and a continuous quality improvement system.
Quality in local schools
The NIEER report didn’t grade any Bexar County school districts, but Baray said some of their classrooms meet or come close to checking off all 10 benchmarks, most notably those in North East and East Central ISDs.
Observers point out that Pre-K 4 SA is much better funded than traditional public schools, and that isn’t lost on Baray. Pre-K 4 SA spends about $11,500 per pupil per year, nearly three times the amount per pupil the state has spent on Pre-K students.
But in Bexar County, many school districts provide more funding than what they get from the state, bringing the average to a level that exceeds $9,000 per pupil, according to a Pre-K 4 SA survey. Baray said she has seen quality improve “tremendously” across local districts in just the three years she has run the city program.
Since East Central partnered with Pre-K 4 SA in 2017, the district has implemented the same curriculum, provided training to assistant teachers, funded second teachers in the classroom, and put principals and teachers through Pre-K 4 SA’s leadership training.
East Central’s administrators and trustees have been strategic about maximizing their dollars, including grants provided by Pre-K 4 SA, Baray said. Where they struggle to meet the benchmarks, Pre-K 4 SA helps out, providing ongoing instructional coaches who meet with teachers on a regular basis, she said.
The influence on high-quality public options will also help Pre-K 4 SA eventually serve more nonqualifying families in its four centers, she said.
“When Pre-K 4 SA opened … our goal was to make space for eligible children who didn’t have access because their district didn’t offer full-day or their district was full,” Baray said.
“We will continue to serve the most vulnerable children,” but now that districts have grown their pre-K capacity, “we’ve been able to expand the spaces we have for the children who don’t qualify,” she added. “That’s our next step.”