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lection Day and the chaos it brings has just barely passed, but community leaders and educators haven’t wasted any time in getting a head start on pushing to put a funding initiative for city-wide universal preschool on next year’s ballot.
Preschool Promise, an initiative led by StrivePartnership, a coalition of educators, city officials and community members who work on local education initiatives, hopes to have Cincinnati voting in 2016 on an initiative to provide tuition assistance to families to support two years of quality-rated preschool education.
The initiative has already received support from city officials like Vice Mayor David Mann, City Councilman Chris Seelbach and Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune.
Several hundred people representing more than 60 groups of congregations, educators and community members gathered at Tryed Stone Church in Bond Hill on Nov. 19 to launch the people’s platform in support of Preschool Promise.
An initiative led by the Amos Project, a non-profit coalition of congregations focused on social justice issues, the people’s platform asks that as Preschool Promise moves forward, it advocates four key points: that children of all races and socioeconomic groups have equal access to quality programs; resources directly work to address racial disparities in Cincinnati; wages of at least $15 an hour and benefits for preschool workers; and engagement and support between the school and families.
“I believe that how we treat our children is a measure of our community,” said Eileen Cooper Reed, former Cincinnati Public Schools board member, at the meeting.
Alexander Shelton, UC student and activist, spoke about the importance of bringing African-American voices to the platform.
“This is important because what you will find is parents don’t want their children shackled,” he said. “Parents don’t want their children to feel less than they are, based on the curriculum that you’re designing to promote one identity over the other.”
Hamilton County Commissioner Portune focused on the impact the platform has to potentially increase job growth in the educational sector. “As we support this, we also support the policies that will bring in new jobs, will provide greater access to those jobs and that will ensure that our jobs are open and available to all,” he said.
Supporters of universal preschool say it’s a way to level the playing field. Cincinnati has the second-highest rate of child poverty in the country, which disproportionately affects minority children. Forty-four percent of children under 5 and 45 percent of children under 18 live under the poverty line, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
A University of Cincinnati Economics Center study funded by StrivePartnership and United Way using state and census data estimated that nearly 40 percent of Cincinnati’s 3-year-olds will not be ready for kindergarten.
“We will break the cycle of poverty for thousands and thousands of children,” said Greg Landsman, executive director of StrivePartnership, at the Preschool Promise launch party Nov. 4 at Rhinegeist Brewery. “We will make it a lot easier for middle-class families to pay for quality preschool, which is a huge, huge deal.”
Preschool, which ranges from glorified daycare to intensive early childhood development programs, nationally still consists of mostly kids above the poverty line. Only 60 percent of American children are enrolled in preschool programs, with that number falling to below 50 percent for those under the poverty line, according to the Center for American Progress.
Research on early childhood programs has shown they have the potential to make an impact not only on kids’ readiness for kindergarten regardless of income level, but also on their future success further down the road.
A 2013 study of New Jersey’s Abbott Preschool Program, which funds programs for lower-income residents, by the National Institute for Early Education Research found that low-income students who attended at least one year of preschool classes had closed the achievement gap between 10 and 20 percent in fourth and fifth grade test scores in math, science and language arts and literacy. Those numbers jumped to 20 to 40 percent for those who had completed two years.
Other reports have also found that investing in universal preschool has financial benefits. A study by the nonprofit Foundation for Child Development found that large-scale programs in Tulsa, Okla., and Chicago saved an estimated three to seven dollars for every dollar spent. On the national level, President Barack Obama has pushed hard to start a national trend to fund high-quality preschool programs in his own initiative called “Preschool for All.”
Preschool Promise is still unclear about where the funding for the ambitious plan would come from. Some suggested options have included a sales or property tax increase or a school levy. But the platform so far specifies that funding would only kick in after all other forms of public assistance are applied, and they must be sustainable for five to 10 years.
The 35 members of the Cincinnati Preschool Promise Steering Committee, which was formed last May, hold the responsibility of developing the details of the program before next election season.
Cincinnati’s initiative is based off of Denver’s nine-year-old preschool program, which funds one year of preschool for 4-year-olds using a voter-approved sales tax. Denver voters approved the tax increase in 2006 for 10 years and in 2014 voted to renew it for another 10.
A 2014 program report states that for the 2013-2014 school year, the program helped fund preschool for about 4,800 4-year-olds, two-thirds of which were from low-income families, and paid an average of $236 a month per child.
The Strive Partnership estimates that Preschool Promise, which would also cover an additional year of preschool for 3-year-olds, is estimated to cost between $16 and $18 million a year and could reach at least 5,000 kids in Cincinnati per year, covering funding gaps for many kids who don’t qualify for other early-education subsidies.
Barb Rider, the former superintendent of Norwood Public Schools who retired in 2003, attended the meeting on Nov. 19 out of curiosity. She thinks universal preschool could have a positive influence on students all the way through high school. “I just see a lot of kids who don’t have access to it. They start so early, and families that can provide do and those families that can’t don’t.” ©
This article appears in Dec 2-8, 2015.
