Towards Universal Pre-K: An Update from West Virginia

For some reason, people often forget about West Virginia when talking about pre-k policy. But West Virginia — like Georgia, Oklahoma, Illinois and New York — is also committed to building towards a voluntary, universal pre-k program for four-year olds. Earlier this spring, REL Appalachia and the Institute for Education Sciences gave us an update on how they are doing.

The report finds that 43 percent of the state’s 4-year olds were enrolled in the pre-k program in 2006-07. That’s a 65 percent increase from 2002-03, and it represents good progress towards the state’s stated goal of enrolling 80 percent of 4-year-olds by 2013. Over the same period, the share of children enrolled in “collaborative partner” programs, where state funds are blended with funding from Head Start and community-based programs, grew to nearly one-third of all children in state-funded pre-k, rate faster than enrollment growth in school-based programs. (The 2002 law that created the pre-k program says that 50 percent of children should be in collaborative partner programs by 2013). Enrollment growth was roughly the same across different racial subgroups, though enrollment of low-income children appears to have slowed in recent years.

One area of growth that caught our attention was among children that live in rural areas. We know that children in rural communities face particular barriers to pre-k access, including transportation and fewer program options. The report found that enrollment rates among rural 4-year-olds (who account for about 62 percent of the state total) were consistently higher than enrollment rates in urban areas. Staff at the state’s Department of Education suggest that this may be because rural areas rely more on public programs, while families in urban areas can also chose private programs and church-based programs that are not participating in the state’s pre-k program.