A federal grant announced Wednesday will provide nearly $60 million over four years for Arkansas to enroll more 4-year-olds in state-funded preschool programs.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell named Arkansas as one of 18 states selected to receive grants totaling $226.4 million from a new Preschool Development Grants Program.
"Expanding access to high-quality preschool is critically important to ensure the success of our children in school and beyond," Duncan said. "These states are demonstrating a strong commitment to building and enhancing early-learning systems, closing equity gaps and expanding opportunity so that more children in America can fulfill their greatest potential."
"I'm pretty excited about it," said Tonya Williams, director of Arkansas' Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division. "We've worked on several federal grants in the past couple of years and have been disappointed more than once."
The announcement came during a White House conference on early education. During the conference, President Barack Obama announced the availability of more than $1 billion in new federal and private money for early-childhood education, including the Preschool Development Grants.
Federal agencies will provide up to $750 million in grants to support early learning for more than 63,000 children across the country who would otherwise not have had access, according to information from the White House. Another $330 million from corporate and philanthropic leaders is expected to further expand the reach and quality of early education for thousands of children.
In Arkansas, the Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division will receive $14.99 million each year for four years from the federal Preschool Development Grants Program to pay for 2,240 additional slots for 4-year-olds from low- to moderate-income families to attend preschool at no cost to those families. In that time, the program will reach nearly 9,000 children.
Although 23,157 4-year-olds qualify for the Arkansas Better Chance program, the program now serves just 14,698 of them, Williams said.
Money from the federal grant will be disbursed to child care providers and school districts through a competitive grant process, Williams said. She expects that the division will begin accepting applications in early 2015.
The applications will be reviewed by the state Board of Education and the state's Early Learning Commission, and the money for the new slots will be administered through Arkansas Better Chance.
The division hopes to begin working with grant recipients in mid- to late spring and that the additional space for preschoolers will be available for the 2015-16 school year, Williams said.
Funding for the state's preschool program has remained at $111 million per year since 2008. An interim legislative study released in November concluded that Arkansas will need an additional $14 million to make up for inflationary costs since 2008 and meet the needs of students enrolled in the pre-kindergarten program.
Jerri Derlikowski, director of education policy for the nonprofit Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, said she was thrilled that the federal grant will open up additional slots in pre-kindergarten but hopes that the Legislature will provide more funding to ensure the quality of existing programs.
"We think the funding picture is limited," Derlikowski said. "We understand where the state is and how limited their resources are."
The new federal grant cannot be used to compensate for inflationary costs for the existing program, Williams said. The greater part of the grant must be spent on serving new children who qualify but are not being served, she said.
The Child Care and Early Childhood Education Division has identified 10 counties with a high need for expanding access to preschool for families at or below 200 percent of the poverty level, which is $47,700 for a family of four. They are Craighead, Crittenden, Jefferson, Lonoke, Miller, Pulaski, St. Francis, Searcy, Union and Washington counties.
The division will accept applications for funding from outside of those counties, however, Williams said.
The Springdale School District in Washington County now has 980 children enrolled in pre-kindergarten through a variety of grant programs that provide $4.85 million annually, said Darlene Freeman, the district's director of pre-kindergarten programs.
"We're so excited," Freeman said. "We still have 150 kiddos on our waiting list."
The district would need an estimated $800,000 more to enroll all 150 children waiting for space, she said.
Crowleys Ridge Educational Service Cooperative serves 200 children in preschool classrooms in Crittenden, Cross, Craighead, Poinsett and Mississippi counties, said Debbie Coffman, an administrator of the organization's Arkansas Better Chance preschool program.
"We're keeping our fingers crossed we'll be one of the recipients," Coffman said.
Coffman periodically visits classrooms and sees the impact the program has on the children's development, she said.
"Their ability to reason and use logic and to problem-solve is greatly increased," she said.
Through Arkansas Better Chance, the Little Rock School District has 1,137 paid slots for 3- and 4-year-olds, said Karen James, the district's director of the early-childhood program.
This year, the district allocated 903 of those spaces for 4-year-olds. The district also accepts 4-year-olds who do not quality for Arkansas Better Chance funding into pre-kindergarten classrooms.
"Expanding the number of funded [Arkansas Better Chance] slots for additional 4-year-olds would increase the number of total students in the district and the pre-K program," James said.
Expanding pre-kindergarten is intended to help the education system overall, Williams said.
"Our children who are in Arkansas Better Chance, we're seeing this data that they're performing and outperforming their same income-level peers who do not get to have pre-K," Williams said. "It provides an outcome for students' learning that continues way beyond pre-K."
A Section on 12/11/2014