Make preschool a priority, not a budget add-on

How can anyone be against school readiness?

That kind of public sentiment is sure to bolster the chances for passage of a new proposal by Gov. Neil Abercrombie to make early education more accessible by covering the cost for those who can’t afford it. The ultimate goal is what’s known nationally as "universal preschool." The idea, which is widely touted by educational experts, is that children in the pre-kindergarten age range gain important preparation for the routines and protocols of classroom learning through curriculum designed for that developmental stage.

It’s hard to argue with the notion that children need a strong launch toward academic success. Although some children may flourish under the home tutelage of their parents in the years before they turn 5 and qualify for kindergarten, many households have budgets requiring both parents to work. Some families are lucky enough to have childcare help from relatives, but even a loving babysitter may not be up to the job of teaching young children.

So removing the economic barriers to formal preschool, which fills a void for many families, represents an investment that makes sense.

Here’s the rub: Under a fiscal reality that is still challenging, early education should be given priority in spending plans, not simply added to the tab. Just to cite one example, state officials are already expressing some concern about the latest United Public Workers contract pact, which seems likely to drive up costs through- out the state’s labor pool.

So in pursuing money for preschool, the Abercrombie administration will need to make some decisions on where to pare back elsewhere in the budget.

Further, a lot of the important details in the current proposal still need to be filled in before the Legislature can make a rational decision. The request for the coming fiscal year is for at least $2.9 million in planning funds. That would be followed in 2015 by a $28.2 million allotment, expected to recur annually, to deliver preschool services to about 3,500 4-year-olds, replacing the discontinued Department of Education junior kindergarten program. The children of low-income parents would be able to attend preschool for free, while middle- and higher-income parents would pay on a sliding scale.

Junior kindergarten had been geared for late-born children who don’t turn 5 in time to enter kindergarten until much later than their age cohort. However, it wasn’t implemented with any consistent success across the state, so it seemed an opportune time to replace it with something more carefully designed, a public-private partnership that would move the needle toward the universal preschool goal. If it’s successful, Abercrombie said, it could be expanded to serve more of the state’s 18,000 students.

Exactly how the rollout would work, offering equitable access to students state-wide, must be one of the blueprints the next year of planning will have to produce.

The state intends to direct funds toward private preschools, rather than housing the preschool students on regular Department of Education campuses. And this raises another point of discussion for lawmakers: how to overcome the ban on using public funds for religious institutions, which are among the operators of the state’s preschools. Issuing vouchers to the needier parents rather than directly reimbursing the schools only somewhat insulates the state from this constitutional problem.

Finally, the state is asking for $648,300 in fiscal year 2014 and $681,300 in fiscal year 2015 to expand staff in the governor’s Executive Office on Early Learning. The administration has yet to explain why these staff costs are needed at a stage when the state is essentially piggybacking on a private preschool delivery system.

That explanation, presumably, will be coming over the course of the next few months.

All of these issues should be surmountable, with careful discussion and planning. In the final analysis, Hawaii shouldn’t discount the findings that so much of any child’s educational grounding is set early. One research finding, frequently shared, is that more than 85 percent of brain development happens by age 5. Within three years of that mark, the pattern for how a child learns is largely set.

Creating a more equitable early-education framework is not the complete solution to Hawaii’s educational shortcomings — students can go off the rails in the later grades, despite their preschool foundation. But giving all children a good basic foundation at the starting gate remains the most rational public policy that a state struggling to boost academic performance can adopt.