Expanding Pre-K? Check Out Washington State

Forty states operate public pre-K programs,  but 4-year-olds are far from guaranteed a seat in the classroom. Last year, the share of 4-year-olds enrolled in public pre-K ranged from nearly 80 percent in Florida to just shy of 1 percent in Rhode Island, in many cases because of limited funding or capacity.

So when state policies mean more children are eligible for public pre-K than state legislators are willing to fund, how do officials decide which children will have access to the classroom and which families will be left to the waiting lists? How does a state ensure it distributes slots to serve the neediest students? Washington state may have the answer.

As the Washington state legislature has funded more and more slots for its pre-K program, called the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP), over the years, the Department of Early Learning has needed to figure out which providers should get those new slots. “There was not necessarily any rhyme or reason more than a program’s capacity to provide space and staff,” says Claire Wilson, Executive Director for Early Learning for the Puget Sound Educational Service District, a regional entity in Washington state that serves 35 school districts. Every year, “I would send out an email and ask [which Puget Sound ESD providers] would take them.”

Unfortunately, programs with the capacity or willingness to take on more students were not necessarily those serving the neediest communities. But two mandates from the Washington state legislature mean that’s changing:

1.     The state-funded pre-K program must prioritize its expansion to areas that already have state-funded full-day kindergarten; and

2.     Even within those areas that have full-day kindergarten, new slots must be prioritized to serve children whose families are at or below 110 percent of the federal poverty level.

Additionally, the expansion of full-day kindergarten itself must also target high-need schools – those with the highest percentage of children who qualify for free and reduced-price lunch. The state has a mandate to offer free, full-day kindergarten to 100 percent of children by the 2017-18 school year, up from 44 percent this year.

It was the challenge of allocating public pre-K seats that led to Washington’s “saturation study,” an innovative approach to finding low-income 4-year-olds who most need pre-K. The study uses a proxy measure to calculate the percentage of low-income children enrolled in either ECEAP or Head Start in a given neighborhood, district, or county. Here’s how it works:

Say a neighborhood – Neighborhood A – has 100 low-income 4-year olds. (Neighborhoods are defined as areas around schools.) Twenty of those children are served by ECEAP slots, and 20 more are enrolled in Head Start. That would put the neighborhood at a saturation rate of 40 percent – meaning 40 percent of its low-income 4-year-olds are already served by public pre-K.

The goal is to allocate precious pre-K slots (only new slots in this case; existing pre-K slots stay with the same providers every year) so that areas with full-day kindergarten all have a minimal baseline of slots.

State officials examine saturation rates at the county level first. For counties with low saturation rates, they study school districts to look for disparities between districts within each county. Finally, they zoom in even further, to neighborhoods, where they allocate the new slots.

New America’s Federal Education Budget Project collects state-funded pre-K enrollment and funding data at the school district level, but many states can’t even provide that. So how is it that Washington state can allocate slots based on this level of detail?

Two aspects of data collection allow Joyce Kilmer, a statistician for the Washington Department of Early Learning, to determine these saturation levels. First, every pre-K provider is required to report the neighborhood school containing a first-grade classroom to which they are closest. Then Kilmer can use another data point – the number of first-graders eligible for the free lunch program at that elementary school – as a proxy measure of poverty for PreK-aged children in the area.

Basically, Kilmer can’t know the number of 4-year olds who live in poverty in a neighborhood, but she does know the number of low-income 6-year-olds at the nearest elementary school. That means she can map out whether the number of slots already available to 4-year-olds gets anywhere close to the number of poor children who should be prioritized under ECEAP.

This level of detail in the data is relatively new. According to Kilmer, Washington’s earliest version of the saturation study started in 2005, comparing Census poverty numbers by county to the number of pre-K slots available per county. By the 2011-12 school year, Kilmer was able to zoom in to the district level. The 2012-13 school year was the first in which Kilmer has conducted the saturation study at the neighborhood level.

Collecting extensive data from the many pre-K providers across a state might be a headache for both the providers and the state officials, but Washington’s additional data requirements are relatively simple. They’re also likely far more accurate than any other method states could use. We think Washington’s solution to targeting the lowest-income kids can be a model for other states with limited data capacity and finite dollars for pre-K.

And finding those children with the greatest need for early education is most important for those kids. As Wilson says, “What we know now and cannot ignore any longer is that we need to meet the needs of children and find them even if they cannot find us.”