Council asked to move pre-k tax vote to May
The Pre-k 4 SA'S governing board of Pre-k 4 SA asked the City Council on Wednesday to schedule the election to renew the sales tax that funds the city program in May rather than November to give it a better shot at voter approval.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg and several council members threw their support behind the request, acknowledging the advantages to the program of being on a shorter ballot.
Only Councilman Clayton Perry expressed hesitation, questioning whether the city should ask for continued funding of education programs at all while it weighs other priorities, including a push to redirect a separate sales tax from Edwards Aquifer protection to bolster public transportation, which also will require voter approval.
“I have to remind people there's competing interests,” Perry said. “Somebody has to pay for it. Where's that money going to come from? And that's what needs to be really driving whether we move on with this program or not.”
Voters first approved the sales tax for the early childhood education program in 2012. Pre-k 4 SA operates four centers, each offering full-day prekindergarten to 500 of the city's 4-year-olds, and it trains teachers and distributes grants to participating school districts. Program leaders estimate more than 452,000 local students have been impacted by the program's various components.
Its budget last fiscal year was $47.3 million, of which $36.4 million was from the sales tax. The city program also gets some pass-through state funding from the school districts whose students attend its centers.
At Wednesday's briefing, Pre-k 4 SA board chairwoman Elaine Mendoza and CEO Saray Baray touted results of a study on the program's first cohort of students conducted by UTSA'S Urban Education Institute. The students showed stronger math and reading scores than their peers in third grade and better school attendance, the study showed.
The program also has been held up as a national model for high quality pre-k. It has continuously met all 10 benchmarks set by the well-regarded National Institute for Early Educational Research for high quality early childhood education.
“Our board stayed focused on data and outcomes so that we could prove worthy of the voters' support,” Mendoza told the council.
She said the May ballot is shaping up to be mostly about education, with board elections for several area school districts and the Alamo Colleges District. She expects voters who pay attention to education will turn out. Educators will be looking for assurance the program will continue, Mendoza said.
But renewed funding for Pre-k 4 SA might get overshadowed in a crowded November ballot that will include a presidential race and other city issues.
“If there's such thing as ballot fatigue, I think that's going to happen,” Mendoza said.
The city doesn't have any council races set for May and would need to call a special election by Feb. 14 to place Pre-k 4 SA funding on that ballot. It has two meetings before that deadline: Jan. 30 and Feb. 13.
If renewed, program leaders want to spend the next eight years using the centers to appeal to more families who are too affluent to qualify for free pre-k but cannot afford private options. About 40 percent of the city's 4-year-olds do not qualify for state-funded pre-k and at least 3,000 of those families cannot afford high-quality private schooling, they have estimated.
Program leaders plan to create spaces for those families through a number of strategies. Currently, the centers serve between 250 and 300 children on a sliding scale tuition. In the future, the program would make those slots free by raising the income threshold for eligibility and increase the number of tuition spaces, Baray said. Some families who get free pre-k could be redirected to partner programs in order to make more space for families who are caught in the middle, she said.