PRE-K FOR PA’S PUSH FOR EXPANDED EARLY EDUCATION MAKES HEADWAY
From the election trail to the capital, Pre-K for PA has shown how an issue campaign evolves
Pre-K for PA is a non-partisan issue campaign that aims to expand access to pre-Kindergarten to all 3 to 4-year-olds in the state by 2018. Now in its second year, the campaign has reached what could be its first major legislative victory: Governor Tom Wolf has proposed $120 million in additional funds to early education, more than doubling the state’s investment.
“The proposed budget puts $100 million into Pre-K Counts and $20 million into Head Start,” said Kate Philips, statewide coordinator for Pre-K for PA.
Pre-K Counts, which is Pennsylvania’s only state program that funds pre-K, was created in 2008 as a part of a comprehensive education bill. In past years, funding for the program has fallen just under $100 million.
Head Start is a federal program created in the 1960s that funds pre-K and which states have the option to supplement with their own funds. In fiscal year 2014, under then-Governor Tom Corbett, the state paid for an additional 5,643 slots in the Head Start program. That would jump to 8,000 slots with the increase.
Overall the budget would add roughly 14,000 seats to high-quality pre-K classrooms, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Education. This breaks down to roughly $8,000 a seat per year, Philips explained.
The budget proposal is a great first step, Philips said, given that 70 percent of 3 to 4-year-olds in Pennsylvania currently do not have access to pre-K. Not investing in this age group’s education has a severe economic and social ripple effect, according to a growing body of research. It leads to a greater demand on taxpayers later on when individuals who are not properly educated require other social services to get by.
From the campaign trail to the state house
But while the benefits of increased spending on early education are clear to Pre-K for PA and its supporters, keeping the issue in the public eye has required the kind of committed outreach and promotion usually reserved for candidates running in an election.
The campaign’s volunteers and regional coordinators worked through the last gubernatorial election to keep the issue of expanded pre-K in front of both voters and candidates. This involved having a presence at campaign events, distributing materials like pamphlets and lawn signs, and continually communicating their goals to candidates and the press.
“We distributed almost 2,000 lawn signs so that people had a way to show their support for the issue during a season when people expect to see lawn signs,” said Anne Gemmell, field director for Pre-K for PA and an employee of Public Citizens for Children + Youth. “It was a little unusual in the sense that it was for an issue and a cause, as opposed to a candidate.”
However unusual, Gemmell contends that jumping into the election season fray is key to getting people to care about an issue.
“For advocates, no matter what issue they’re championing, an election year is always a good year to do it because people who understand or are mildly interested in policy decisions are paying attention and the candidates are paying attention,” Gemmell said. “It is the time that we as a society have conversations about what the big vision is going forward.”
Elections are also a time when candidates latch onto ideas and make them a part of their platform. A number of candidates, Governor Wolf included, said they supported expanding early education. But Pre-K for PA, a non-partisan organization, did not endorse any of them.
“We are not an endorsing entity. We are just an effort that in some ways mimics endorsing organizations in the ways that we engaged in the public dialogue,” like putting out lawn signs or campaign buttons, she said. “We sort of thought of the issue as our candidate.”
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Indiana Gazette: Forum Highlights Early Education Issues
During an Early Learning Forum at Indiana University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday, experts discussed how expanding access to high-quality pre-kindergarten programs is essential to school readiness, crime prevention, workforce development and future national security.
Child advocates, law enforcement, and business and military leaders participated in the forum, including state Rep. Dave Reed, R-Indiana; Indiana County Sheriff Robert Fyock; and Rear Adm. Thomas J. Wilson of Mission: Readiness — Military Leaders for Kids.
Mission: Readiness is a national security nonprofit organization that aims to reverse the high percentage of youths ineligible for military service.
The event was planned by partners of the Pre-K for Pennsylvania Campaign: The Pittsburgh Association for the Education of Young Children; Mission: Readiness; and Fight Crime: Invest in Kids, a nonpartisan crime prevention organization. It was part of a series sponsored by PNC Bank’s Grow Up Great Initiative.
“Unfortunately, 72 percent of young adults in Pennsylvania cannot meet the military’s standards in math, reading and problem-solving,” Wilson said in a press release. “High-quality pre-K is a proven investment that will help reverse this trend.”
In Indiana County, officials said, 68 percent of the roughly 1,900 3- and 4-year-olds do not have access to a high-quality pre-K program.
Fyock, speaking on behalf of Fight Crime, said quality pre-K helps build a solid foundation for educational success, which in turn impacts crime prevention.
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Erie Reader: Pre-K for PA
Perry Elementary’s pre-K classroom was buzzing with activity – it looks a bit like play, and it looks a lot like fun, but there is a clearly defined mission: student success in the formative educational years to come. It was the middle of “activity center” time, during which students self organize, go where they want, and do mostly as they please, as long as the activities are constructive and purposeful.
From 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., students engage in a multitude of activities from writing their names on a chalkboard next to their name tags as a form of practice in both handwriting and spelling, to student-selected independent and small-group activities – like activity centers – designed to reinforce teacher-led instruction and lessons from daily reading exercises. The teacher’s role during these activities is to facilitate the activities and monitor the language the children use to ensure that their vocabulary is expanding and being used in an appropriate way.
On the morning I arrived at Perry Elementary, the mostly four-year-old students were scattered throughout the classroom in what can best be described as organized chaos. But at the heart of the chaos sit the keys to future success. That’s because pre-K education isn’t about rote memorization of letters and numbers, it’s about helping students develop social skills and beginning the process of creating independent learners.
“The social skills that the children develop in activity centers is really amazing,” says Peggie Conn, a prekindergarten and kindergarten coach for the Erie School District. “It’s a routine day and the children know what to expect. After the first month of school, the kids kind of run the room.”
The Erie School District houses and supports several local pre-K programs through Pre-K Counts grants, which provide funds for school districts and agencies to make high-quality pre-K seats available to the communities they serve.
“You can walk into a pre-K classroom anytime, unannounced, and you’ll see serious learning going on,” says Erie School District director of communications Matt Cummings.
That’s essentially the definition of “high-quality” pre-K. Students are engaged in rigorous educational activity that prepares them for social and academic success in kindergarten and the first few years of elementary school that follow.
In the “block center” of the room, two boys constructed a dentist office from cardboard blocks. It was complete with a dentist and a patient and reflected a story they had read earlier that week about going to the dentist. A group of girls role-played in the “dramatic play center,” acting out a different story. In the reading corner, a girl “read” independently on a blue patent leather couch as she listened to the story on headphones, an exercise that helps the kids identify words they hear as well as allowing them to model reading behavior. Across the room, from the reading cove, in the music corner, a girl and boy sang – what else – “Let it Go” from Disney’s Frozen.
Yes, it’s play. Yes, it’s fun, but it is all in the name of preparing students for success when they get to kindergarten. Whether or not a child succeeds in kindergarten can lay the foundation for success or failure throughout that child’s educational career. Appropriate or not, children who fail kindergarten have a stigma that follows them
throughout their elementary and secondary schooling, and the metrics for student success are often better measured in the home rather than in the classroom because it’s level of attention, direction, and developmental assistance that children receive from their parents or guardians in the home directly correlates to how well prepared the child is to enter kindergarten.
Paradoxically, early childhood education is one of the few areas of economic transcendence between high-income and low-income families. High-income families have their choice of schools and programs while state and federal programs provide opportunities for children of low-income families to attend high-quality pre-K programs. In Erie County, 10 percent of children ages three and four are enrolled in high-quality pre-K and another 28 percent are enrolled in publicly funded programs.
“The greatest group that needs the greatest help are the children of working families whose parents are working every day, catching the early bus, but at the end of the month just don’t have the resources to be able to commit to pre-K,” says Erie attorney Ron DiNicola, who is co-chair with Erie businessman Nick Scott, Jr. of the NWPA faction of the Pre-K for PA campaign. “It is very much a middle-class program that helps those who need it the most and work the hardest.”
Pre-K for PA is an issue campaign that has brought together business leaders, civil leaders, and politicians with an array of ideological positions from across the state to push for public funding of universal high-quality pre-kindergarten education.
Read the rest of the article at the Erie Reader.
In Philadelphia, Gov. Tom Wolf Urges Better Funding For Early Education Across Pennsylvania
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Gov. Tom Wolf was in Philadelphia today, discussing the future of education at a conference of the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC).
A friendly crowd greeted the governor, who earlier this month proposed $2 billion in additional funding for early education in Pennsylvania over the next four years.
“There is not a better investment that we can make as a commonwealth that invests in early childhood education,” he said at the Pennsylvania Convention Center meeting. “If we get that right, it really works — right?”
The results, says Wolf, are better students and higher graduation rates.
The governor also said he’s had preliminary talks about his proposal with state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
While that process plays out, the childhood educators will be holding a fundraiser called “Pennies for Pre-K.”
Read the rest of the story here.
Wolf, advocates pushing for big ticket high-quality preschool in Pa.
Early childhood advocates are asking families across Pennsylvania to scrounge through their couch cushions on behalf of high-quality preschool programs.
Advocates hope Pennies 4 Pre-K, a new initiative by advocacy group Pre-K for PA, will draw attention to a much larger pot of funding that could be headed their way: $120 million in Governor Tom Wolf’s proposed education budget.
Appearing at the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children (DVAEYC) this week, Governor Wolf promoted his budget as a longterm investment. “Children who participate in high-quality preschool education perform better in school, they graduate in higher rates,” said Wolf. “If all those things happen, our society works better and so does our economy.”
As the crowd of educators dropped pennies into colorful plastic buckets, Wolf anticipated some of the criticism already brewing in the legislature against his expansive education budget. “We’re taking precious, scarce public dollars and we’re looking for priorities that are going to make our commonwealth better,” said Wolf.
High-quality and high cost
Wolf’s budget calls for an additional 14,000 new, high-quality pre-kindergarten seats through the Head Start and Pre-K Counts programs for this fall. The $120 million to fund these seats is “down payment,” increasing enrollment in state-funded programs by 75 percent. Only 7.5 percent of Pennsylvania children under five are currently enrolled in a high-quality preschool, and tuition for these programs can run over $10,000 a year without government subsidy.
Executive Director of DVAEYC Sharon Easterling said the pennies were symbolic. “We hope to be able to raise enough money to fund a couple of slots. We want the legislature to do the rest.”
Wolf faces an uphill battle in approving his ambitious education budget through a legislature controlled by Republicans, many of whom have criticized his spending.
Politically, pre-K can garner bipartisan support but in recent years greater awareness to the uneven outcomes of some programs has undermined some of this support, according to Ron Haskins, Brookings Institute fellow and co-director of the Center on Children and Families.
Read more of the story here.
Sen. Alloway is lobbied to spend more on pre-k education
Alloway: Budget that doubles funding ‘not in the realm’ of the possible
By Jim Hook
jhook@publicopinionnews.com @JimHookPO on Twitter
CHAMBERSBURG >> An anti-crime group is asking Sen. Richard Alloway and other Pennsylvania legislators to spend more taxpayer money on pre-school education.
The bottom line for Fight Crime: Invest in Kids — quality early childhood education reduces crime, lowers prison costs and saves taxpayers’ dollars. The nonprofit arranged a meeting Monday at the St. Paul’s Children’s Center among Alloway, pre-school educators and local law enforcement officials.
Alloway, R-Chambersburg, on Monday appeared receptive, but did not commit to the cause.
Gov. Tom Wolf’s budget proposes increased spending on pre-k programs. The Democrat’s budget faces an uphill battle in the Republican controlled Senate and House.
Children who did not go to a quality preschool are more likely in later life to get trouble with the law than children who attended pre-k, according to a variety of studies.
“They get behind in second or third grade,” Chambersburg Police Chief David Arnold said. “It’s like a tsunami. They never get caught up. As a government, you put the emphasis on the front end rather than pay at the back end.”
“By third grade they’re already feeling like a failure,” said Gladys Leon, director of early childhood development at Chambersburg Area School District.
They don’t have a mentor showing them that they can succeed with an education, and they start caving to peer pressure, she said.
Investing in pre-school children encourages them to stay in school and participate in other school activities and sports, Franklin County Sheriff Dane Anthony said. The more they participate, the more successful they are in life.
“When you engage that child (in pre-kindergarten) you get that child’s parent involved, and you can make tremendous changes in communities,” said Kerry Fair, family engagement manager for Franklin County Head Start Program Inc.
Alloway said told the panel that he was familiar with the impacts of pre-k education, and wanted to know, “Where’s the breakdown?”
Few families have access to quality pre-k education in Pennsylvania and especially Franklin County, according to Bruce Clash, Pennsylvania director of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids. Seventy percent of Pennsylvania children do not have access while 87 percent in Franklin County do not.
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