Following pushback from the child care sector, Democrats in the Vermont Senate are backing off from plans to enact full-day prekindergarten in public schools.
Currently, the families of all 3- and 4-year-olds in Vermont receive a voucher for each child to receive 10 hours a week of prekindergarten programming at the public or private provider of their choice. As part of a larger overhaul of Vermont’s child care system, lawmakers in S.56 had proposed eliminating those vouchers and instead requiring public schools to simply offer free, full-day prekindergarten to all 4-year-olds.
The legislation also envisions dramatically increasing subsidies to child care facilities, although the bill’s Senate architects have not yet settled on precisely how much additional funding private centers would receive.
“One of the things that we heard in testimony is how if we took all the 4-year-olds out categorically right away, it would devastate child care facilities,” said Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden Southeast, one of the bill’s sponsors. “Because the 4-year-olds really do provide the resources for child care centers to take care of the younger kids.”
The Senate Health and Welfare Committee, which Lyons chairs, is planning to vote out S.56 this week, ahead of the Legislature’s mid-session “crossover” deadline, once committee members have decided how much to beef up child care subsidies. But the prekindergarten section of the bill will be revised to create a summer study committee to further explore the issue. (Language calling for that study is being finalized in the Senate Education Committee.)
Sen. Ruth Hardy, D-Addison, one of S.56’s lead sponsors, said she would have much preferred to keep public prekindergarten in the bill. But she joked that she had “lost that battle right now” and didn’t want to jeopardize the rest of the legislation, which is expected to allocate more than $100 million in new funding to expand subsidies to more middle-class families and improve child care worker pay and benefits.
“That’s huge,” Hardy said. “So I think even if that’s all we do, that’s a major accomplishment. It’s a lot of money and it will have a big impact on a lot of people’s lives.”
Universal prekindergarten vouchers are particularly important to child care providers because infants and toddlers require even smaller staff-to-student ratios than preschoolers. In an industry with razor-thin margins, prekindergarten vouchers essentially subsidize care for the youngest and most expensive children to care for. Child care advocates also argued that dramatically scaling up public school prekindergarten programs could create an exodus of staff, who might decamp from private facilities to public schools, where pay and benefits are far better.
But Aly Richards, the CEO of Let’s Grow Kids, Vermont’s leading child care advocacy group, argued that resistance to embracing full-day prekindergarten in public schools now is not all — or even primarily — about money. Even if schools offer full-day programming, there will still be important gaps in coverage, she said, particularly in the summer and after school.
“Zero to 5, kids and their families need full workday, full calendar year (care),” Richards said. “And when you expand this into schools, it’s actually full school day and full academic year.”
Public school groups, including the Vermont Principals’ Association, remain strongly supportive of expanding to full-day prekindergarten as soon as possible. They argue that without much ramp-up time, schools can take on the new pupils, and that such an expansion would make specialized services for kids who need extra help available earlier.
But in the absence of implementation now, VPA executive director Jay Nichols said, his group will instead push lawmakers to tweak Vermont’s school funding formula so that schools already providing full-day prekindergarten programming don’t suffer a tax penalty. Right now, prekindergarteners are counted as part-time students, whether or not a school offers full-day programming or not. That inflates a school’s “per-pupil spending” figure, which in turn raises that district’s tax rate.
“We bring up the example of places like Winooski, where there are no private care providers,” Nichols told the Senate Education Committee earlier this month. “So we’ve got the school doing it right now. But it’s hurting them in their budget … and they’re one of our poorest systems in Vermont and poorest communities.”
Sen. Brian Campion, D-Bennington, the panel’s chair, said he wasn’t ready yet to say whether he supported that proposal, although he said his committee would take testimony on the matter and forward its recommendations on to the Senate Finance Committee.
“I hate to say it does make sense only because, who knows, maybe it won’t after I look deep into it, but I think this is certainly something that has to be on the table this year to consider,” he said.