[G]ov. Peter Shumlin celebrated the value of pre-kindergarten education Thursday at Union Elementary School in Montpelier as the law guaranteeing the program to all Vermont children goes into effect Friday.
The law was signed by Shumlin in 2014 and makes Vermont one of four states to guarantee quality universal pre-K access to all Vermont 3- and 4-year-olds for the two years before they enter kindergarten, Shumlin said.
“I don’t think there’s a more important bill that ensures kids have a strong start,” he said.
The program starts this fall and is available to all families, regardless of income.
Rebecca Holcombe, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Education, said that in 2013 and 2014 a study showed that children who went to pre-K were more prepared to learn in kindergarten.
Children from low-income backgrounds who had no pre-K education showed a 30 percent probability of being prepared for kindergarten, while children of low-income backgrounds who had one or two years of pre-K education had up to a 55 percent probability of readiness, Holcombe said.
The correlation holds true for students with higher income backgrounds, but it is not as pronounced, according to the press release.
Hal Cohen, secretary of the Vermont Agency for Human Services, said that he views the pre in pre-K as short for “prevention.”
“High quality pre-K education can prevent future problems for our children,” Cohen said.
Developmental problems and learning disabilities can be identified in pre-K, Cohen said, and teachers can begin to intervene with specialized learning programs to prevent bigger problems later on in a child’s education.
Amanda Pacilli is the mother of Genevieve, a 5-year-old girl who will start kindergarten in the fall. Pacilli said that it was difficult finding an affordable pre-K for Genevieve, and the new law will help bring down her overall child care costs from$250 per week to $165 per week.
A minimum of 10 hours of pre-K education per week will be offered to Vermont children over the course of 35 weeks annually, Holcombe said.
More than 70 percent of children under the age of 6 have both parents in the labor force, according to a press release from the governor’s office.
Leah Jones, a mother of three children in Montpelier schools, said the law is a positive advancement, but the two hour a day program schedule is problematic for working parents.
“I look forward to the program growing,” Jones said.
Increasing the number of hours for the pre-K program in the future, “will be up to other governors,” Shumlin said.
The education fund will subsidize the program, Holcombe said.
“We decided this was every bit as important to our education system as anything else,” Shumlin said.
The funding mechanism is a voucher system, each student will get $3,092 for the 2016 to 2017 academic year, which the district will pay to the pre-K program provider that the parents choose for their children, whether that program is private or public.
“Now that we have made [pre-K] access universal, we need to ensure all Vermonters, regardless of income, are benefitting from the new law,” Shumlin said in the press release.
Shumlin said he has challenged the Agency of Education and Agency of Human Services to ensure low-income Vermonters who “too often fall through the cracks” use the program.
CORRECTION: Shumlin incorrectly stated that Vermont was the first state to adopt universal pre-K.
