Lawmakers advanced a bill Tuesday that would make a one-time change to education law to ensure pre-kindergarten pupils are counted accurately for the purposes of funding.
Because of a delay in fingerprinting pre-K workers last fall, some private programs weren’t able to start classes in time for the annual headcount, which comes in October.
S.1 is meant to fix the problem. Its sponsors are Sens. Tim Ashe, D/P Chittenden, Kevin Mullin, R-Rutland, Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, and Ann Cummings, D-Washington. The bill got unanimous support from the Senate Education Committee on Tuesday.
“The official count did not accurately capture the number of children expected to be enrolled in pre-K,” Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe told lawmakers Friday. “An artificially low count would result in lower equalized pupil count for the purposes of setting a tax rate. As a consequence, a low count would lead to an artificially high tax rate. In small districts, this could be unfairly injurious to schools and taxpayers.”
Federal and state education law requires fingerprint-supported background checks for school workers, including private providers that participate in Act 166, the state’s universal pre-K law. The state’s Child Development Division started fingerprinting Sept. 1, which wasn’t early enough for most private providers to start pre-K in time for the October headcount.
This is the first year that universal publicly funded pre-K is being offered across the state. Parents get vouchers that pay for 10 hours of pre-K at any private or public program. The money comes out of the school budget where the family lives.
School districts get paid on a per-pupil basis, as reflected by the headcount.
New regulations that went into effect in August required all child care employees — not just those at programs accepting vouchers — to be fingerprinted, not just compete a background check. Under Act 166, the Child Development Division took over all background checks and fingerprinting. Over the summer it was putting in place a new vetting system. At the same time, there was a lot of interest from providers wanting to be approved to accept Act 166 vouchers, and it created a backlog.
In September, Holcombe sent out a memo that said some private providers were just beginning their background checks and had not cleared in time for the start of the school year.
Each year, the law requires the Agency of Education to provide the count of equalized pupils, or average daily membership, of each school district by Dec. 15. The agency initiated a second count because it feared that students were left out of enrollments because of the fingerprinting delay. The agency has found some discrepancies already, but the count won’t be completed until the end of the week, according to Holcombe.
“There was a substantial difference between the first and second count,” Holcombe said.
S.1 changes the earlier student count to a “preliminary one” and validates the second count for this one time. It changes the enrollment date to Jan. 13, 2017, for children attending approved programs that completed the criminal background checks after the previous count.
“People understand the imperative here that we need to do right by these districts. It wasn’t their fault they weren’t done with fingerprinting,” said Holcombe.
The bill will advance to the Senate.
