Florida: Lessons for Gaining A Fuller Picture of Pre-K at the Local Level

Last week, the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative and Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) rolled out a major expansion to FEBP’s education database. For the first time, the site includes data on pre-K in states and school districts. In collecting the data, we found that states and districts face significant obstacles in collecting reliable, comparable pre-K data. But we also found that one state deserves a closer look for its organized state of information on funding and enrollment at the district level: Florida.

Most states­–Florida is no exception–fund pre-K programs run by public schools as well as programs run by community-based organizations (CBOs), which are typically private non-profit or for-profit groups. The problem with this structure, from a data-gathering perspective, is that it is very difficult to collect data on how many children are in publicly funded pre-K programs within the boundaries of a school district. States tend to report data on district-run programs separately from data on CBOs, and data on enrollment in programs run by CBOs are likely to include children who live in different school districts. A new report that accompanied the release of the data, Counting Kids and Tracking Funds in Pre-K and Kindergarten: Falling Short at the Local Level,examines the plethora of issues preventing good data collection efforts and thus hindering good policy.

But it’s not all bad. In the course of collecting data and writing the report we discovered that Florida has found a way to track children enrolled and funding allocated to both district-run programs and CBOs within the structure of the school district.

Here’s how it works: The Office of Early Learning, a state agency, distributes funds to Early Learning Coalitions, which then distribute to counties whose geographical boundaries are contiguous with school districts. Some of the money goes to pre-K programs run by a public school, and some to CBOs. But all the children are counted, and all the funding is reported, at the school district/county level. 

Having counties that are geographically identical to school districts puts Florida at a natural advantage when it comes to collecting pre-K data in this comprehensive way. And the establishment of the Early Learning Councils leverages that advantage. In other states, school district boundaries are often different from municipalities, and CBOs are more likely to think of the population they serve in terms of a town or a county than a school district, since historically those CBOs probably looked to the county and not the school district for support. But in Florida, because school districts and counties share the same geographic borders, and because the learning coalitions distribute and track funding to school districts and CBOs based on those borders, the reliability and organization of the data allows us to get a much better picture of how many children receive publicly funded pre-K services at the district level than most other states.

In fact, Florida’s collection methods are so strong that we feel comfortable calculating per pupil expenditure, something that we expressly advise against doing for all other state-funded pre-K funding and enrollment data in FEBP. In Hillsborough County, Florida, for instance, FEBP data show that 10,286 children were enrolled in Florida’s Voluntary Prekindergarten program (VPK) in 2010. In other states, we would only know how many students were enrolled in VPK programs run by the school district in that county, but because of Florida’s collection methods, that number represents how many children were enrolled in every type of VPK program, including those run by CBOs. This allows for a more complete picture of pre-K funding and enrollment in that district, both between years (between 2007 and 2009, for instance, per pupil expenditure decreased by 15 percent) and compared to other districts in the state.

Not only does Florida’s structure work well for comparing data between districts’ pre-K programs, but it also enables one to see how underfunded pre-K programs are compared to K-12. For instance, in 2009, per-pupil funding in Hillsborough County for pre-K was around $2,300 but for K-12 the number is almost $8,600. For those familiar with the sad state of funding for pre-K in Florida (not to mention the existence of long waiting lists for pre-K slots in other states), this may not be surprising, but for a parent in Hillsborough County, this could serve as a wake up call.          

Florida VPK definitely has problems – in addition to low funding per pupil, it is designed to cover only three hours a day.  But in terms of organization and data collection, Florida is far ahead of the pack and could serve as a model as other states attempt to better organize and collect pre-K data.