June Mather is largely done raising her four kids, who are now in college or beyond, and she’s glad she made the decision to take charge of their K-12 education herself. Homeschooling may not be for everyone, but she listens, unconvinced, to the current proposals moving Hawaii toward universal preschool.

"I think preschool children are best nurtured in the home environment," said Mather, who is part of a Christian homeschooling association. "The Lord gave the children to the parents, and the parents are the best to help the children develop."

On the other side of the debate is a broad coalition in the community that favors at least a significant expansion of access to preschool. For starters, the state must figure out what to do with the next cohort of children just shy of the right age to begin kindergarten next school year (commonly described as the "late-borns"), now that the junior kindergarten program has been dismantled.

The leading proposal is to replace junior kindergarten and expand on the function through a state-funded preschool program, to be delivered largely through subsidizing private preschool tuition payments for needy families. A bill to launch the initiative has been championed by Gov. Neil Abercrombie and was moved along last week by the state House Finance Committee.

A constitutional issue (see story, below), budgetary constraints and other concerns mean there will be a lot more talking to do before the legislation takes its final form.

For one thing, the Abercrombie administration, including the Executive Office on Early Learning, has not yet won everyone over to the basic concept of universal, mandatory preschool.

Mather is one of the doubters. Among her concerns are the cost — which, according to the state’s own estimates, could amount to $125 million annually. However, she said her bigger worry is that small children tend to learn differently and may do better in a personalized setting.

"At this young age there is such a wide range, the home is still the best to get the help in the areas that are needed," she said.

Mather points to works such as Raymond Moore’s "Better Late Than Early," a book that posits the value of waiting for more maturation before pressing for children to advance in reading and other learning skills.

However, Moore’s views and those of other critics run up against a raft of research that points to significant gains to children who attend preschool, advantages that persist through age 40.

Allison Henward is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Teacher Education whose emphasis is on early education.

The reports are all out there, she said. For example: The HighScope Perry Preschool Study has tracked preschoolers who were ages 3 and 4 from 1962 to 1967, into adulthood. They were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool, according to one update from the study.

Overall, the sum of the data from such research is clear, Henward said: A quality early education provides the foundation for academic success.

"It’s a big issue of equity," she said. "Some children are able to have it and some are not. We have some programs in place, but it doesn’t cover the vast majority of kids. It is your very lowest-income children who are left out."

The existing pipelines to help poorer families underwrite preschool tuition include the state-funded Preschool Open Doors program as well as the familiar federal program known as Head Start.

Both are feeling the effects of the economic downturn. The larger program by far is Head Start, which gives federal support to 2,681 children statewide, but it’s now facing a 5 percent cut due to the recent start of federal budget sequestration, said Debbi Amaral, president of the Head Start Association of Hawaii and Outer Pacific.

Current program standards, including requirements that teachers have an associate or bachelors degree in early childhood, mean teachers have moved up on the pay scale, Amaral added — and that means covering program operations will take more money, not less.

"We are decreasing by 20 slots in order to balance our budget," she said, referring to the Head Start program where she works, at Maui Economic Opportunity Inc. "That’s 20 less children getting to go to preschool."

Open Doors is run by People Attentive to Children (PATCH), the private nonprofit that originated as a referral service guiding parents to day-care providers. PATCH got the contract to run Open Doors, a program funded through the state Department of Human Services, in 2009, said Jim Eberle, program manager for the preschool subsidy.

At that point it had been funneling tuition help to 1,500 children annually, Eberle said, but budget cuts forced that number down to 500 for the 2009-2010 fiscal year. The following year it was trimmed again to its current level of 325 preschool aid slots, with an annual budget of $1.6 million.

Eberle said he’s heard some complaints that the state is needlessly creating a new system with the initiative and he agrees with them to this extent: Preschool Open Doors is an existing pipeline, he said, and with a little updating, it could receive available funds and be readily used to ramp up access to preschool.

"I’m more in line with expanding what we have," he said. "We have an infrastructure that could be built upon now; there needs to be an adjustment to the fee scale and income limits — we’re working off of 2004 income limits.

"The 3,500 ‘late-borns’ need to be addressed," he added. "We could accommodate them to this program with some tweaks to systems and administrative rules."

The way the program runs now is to give income-qualified families up to the DHS maximum of $710 per month to cover or offset tuition costs for an accredited, state-licensed preschool, he said; if the school is licensed but not accredited, the maximum subsidy drops to $675.

Preschool Open Doors operates on a sliding fee scale, with the poorest families getting the largest subsidy. But budget cuts meant that even they pay a percentage, Eberle said.

"That’s grocery money for extreme-poverty people," he said. "Let’s say their part comes to $45 a month. Then they think, ‘Do we pay $45 out of pocket or do we put food on the table?’"

Hawaii’s various populations don’t all share the same set of educational priorities, he said, with some responding to a cultural bias in favor of in-family care being more important for such young children.

"It is a money issue, that’s a big one," Eberle said. "But also there is a real need to educate the people on the critical importance of preschool. There needs to be a campaign to make the general public understand how this benefits everyone."

Parents with young children aren’t the only ones with an opinion on this issue.

Bill Prescott, a Nanakuli resident and longtime veteran of the Waianae Coast School Concerns Coalition, believes parents could be enlisted in the early education mission if the public school system would tell them what skills their keiki will need before starting kindergarten.

"The other thing is, how come we don’t have something in high school about parents teaching their children?" he asked. "They’re going to become teachers, whether they want to or not."

There could be room to accommodate a range of preschool settings in a new statewide system. Ben Naki, program director for the Head Start classes offered by Parents and Children Together (PACT) in Kalihi, said that there are Head Start programs that are delivered in homes.

A lot needs to happen before a robust statewide system is fully developed, Eberle said, not the least of which is overcoming a capacity and logistics problem. Many families in rural areas, particularly on the neighbor islands, have transportation challenges even getting their children to the nearest preschool, he said.

But, he said, the need for many, many more children to have the boost that preschool provides is unquestionable.

"These children have less of a dropout rate for K-12," Eberle added. "They tend to go on to higher education, which means better careers. They stay out of the system — it breaks the cycle of families needing assistance. There’s less crime, less welfare.

"The data shows what it shows," he said. "It’s advantageous for the child to attend preschool."