Podcast Transcript: Pre-K vs. Child Care? Why Texas Families Need Both

Intersect Ed Podcast – Season 3, Episode 3

Note: Intersect Ed is best experienced as a podcast. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes emotion and emphasis missing from the transcript.

MORGAN SMITH: Welcome to the Intersect Ed Podcast, where the stories of public education policy and practice meet. 

I’m your host, Morgan Smith. Today we are tackling a topic that is the foundation to student success: pre-kindergarten. We’ll hear from the public school leaders who are getting early education right — and talk about how Texas lawmakers can increase access to all kinds of high-quality childcare for the state’s roughly 2.3 million kids under the age of six.

Study after study has shown that investing in high-quality pre-kindergarten programs reaps dividend after dividend — from setting kids up for strong academic performance later on to the economic stability that comes with keeping more parents in the workforce. In the last decade — largely due to innovative approaches at the local level — Texas has made some progress in supporting its youngest students. But still, more than 90,000 three- and four-year-olds remain on waitlists. 

So what is holding us back? As usual, when it comes to public education in Texas, the answer is complicated — and yes, it does have something to do with funding. 

DAVID FEIGEN: Right now parents in Texas deserve options to high-quality early learning programs, and they do not have those options today. And the main reason for that is that access to child care is incredibly expensive. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is David Feigen. He is the director of early learning policy at Texans Care for Children, which is a multi-issue children’s advocacy and research organization focused on state policy. He says that the cost of a Texas family’s average annual childcare for an infant is around $11,000.

DAVID FEIGEN: Families also are having to constantly make a choice between do I pay for child care that I maybe can’t afford? Do I settle for child care that I think is less than my child deserves and in some cases could even be unsafe? Or do I just leave the workforce altogether because none of these options are really doable? Our public pre-K program starts to really become available for families at age four. There are some three-year-old programs. But even for that, it’s a very limited eligibility. It ends at 3:00 p.m., which is not a great option for working parents in some cases, and so the options that are available to parents are inadequate.

MORGAN SMITH: If you aren’t a parent, these details may surprise you. If you are a parent, they are all too real. Currently, the state only provides half-day funding for a limited group of four-year-olds and an even smaller group of three-year-olds who meet certain eligibility criteria, like coming from an economically disadvantaged home or learning English as a second language. But some school districts — recognizing how important early education can be for the success of students and the workforce — have decided to offer access to pre-kindergarten programs even with limited state funding. 

MICHELLE RINEHART: So in Alpine ISD, we provide full-day open enrollment, at no cost, pre-K, for three-year-olds and four-year-olds throughout our community. So our board was very committed to adding in a pre-K three program, even though it’s not necessarily state required, but they saw the value in doing that. And our board is equally committed to providing these programs at no cost to our community. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Dr. Michelle Rinehart, the superintendent of Alpine ISD, a West Texas district where about 60% of students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. There, the district takes an annual financial loss of about $200,000 to operate four pre-kindergarten classrooms. This investment was so important to the school board that they preserved it for the current school year even when facing a $1.5 million deficit on a $10 million budget. 

MICHELLE RINEHART: So when I started in Alpine three years ago, we had less than 12 licensed child care spots in Alpine for more than 200 children under the age of three at that time. And so that larger context is both a workforce challenge, but it’s also an educational challenge in our community. And so really, to our end, in a rural location that really had a dearth of high-quality child care options, it was a way to provide high-quality, consistent child care for three-year-olds and four-year-olds within our community while also helping those three- and four-year-olds get kindergarten-ready and start school in kindergarten a year or two years later ready to go and ready to learn.

MORGAN SMITH: Alpine ISD is also a year into an innovative new program that creates a partnership between the school district and private child care providers to help increase access to early education in the community. The partnership provides a way for private schools to dually enroll their students in a public school — so while the students are physically receiving their education from a private center, they are co-enrolled in the Alpine school district. 

MICHELLE RINEHART: That activates an additional funding stream for those children that’s then split between the ISD and the child care center. So, in essence, what is happening with this program is that children within these private centers or private schools are then subject to all of the same kind of rules and regulations, if you will, of public schools, but then also receive public funding in support of their education. So the partnership with the ISD helps provide access to that funding stream, but then also provides all of the supports around meeting the state’s requirements in terms of registration, data collection, curriculum, reporting, all of these different pieces, the school helps with that so that the private school doesn’t have to take on all of that burden as well. But the promise of these kinds of partnerships is to bring additional state revenue, both to underfunded school districts like Alpine ISD, but also to underfunded child care centers that also aren’t well compensated from the state side, either. So really to leverage state resources in support of children in both underfunded public schools and then under-resourced private facilities as well.

MORGAN SMITH: The City of San Antonio’s PreK 4 SA — the voter-approved, early learning initiative that is funded through an eighth of a cent of local sales tax — pioneered these kinds of partnerships over a decade ago.

SARAH BARAY: Early learning spans from birth to age eight. When you think about the field of early learning, that is working with young children, birth through age eight. When we get into systems, whether it be the school system or the childcare system, that’s where we start talking about Pre-K and childcare. 

MORGAN SMITH: This is Dr. Sarah Baray, the CEO of Pre-K 4 SA.

SARAH BARAY: Child care is licensed by the state of Texas, and they are providers who provide a warm, loving, caring environment for children to go when their families are working where their parents are at work. Preschool, or pre-K as we know it, is part of the public school system, and that is seen as the grade that happens before kindergarten. These two systems are very separate, both in licensing, funding, in the way that they operate, but they actually have a lot of similarities, and in some places, those two systems actually go together. We understand that young children, a four-year-old is going to become a five-year-old, it’s just like a two-year-old is going to become a three-year-old and a three-year-old is going to become a four-year-old, the children move through the system, and so there really needs to be continuity across the birth through age five system.

MORGAN SMITH: But though these kinds of public-private partnerships show a lot of promise, they’ve been slow to take off in other communities, in part because they can be difficult to implement. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for districts or child care providers — the way forward is different in each community.

MICHELLE RINEHEART: There’s so much work that has to be done in-house. You can learn from someone else about, “Oh, here’s how we did that. We sent our district nurse to that location.” Or, “Oh, we tried to contract with somebody in that city who would do these screenings on our behalf,” or whatnot. You might get high-level ideas, but then in terms of actually putting those into action or thinking, working through all the steps to actually make those happen for your own district, that’s local work, for sure.

MORGAN SMITH: In 2019, the Legislature passed HB 3, which was intended to help pave the way for more of these kinds of partnerships — but there is more work to be done. Here is Sarah Baray again.

SARAH BARAY: HB 3 was big in that it created the vehicle for pre-K partnerships and encouraged school districts to partner with high-quality child care centers to deliver public pre-K in the childcare center. That’s really important because families need options when it comes to early learning because families have all kinds of different needs. For some families, if you have an infant, to be able to drop your infant and your four-year-old off at one place and know your four-year-old’s going to get pre-K, but your infant is going to get high-quality care, that is a really important opportunity for families. 

It also provides continuity of care for the young children. They can go from being an infant in a center and knowing the teachers and being a familiar place all the way up to going to get their pre-K education in there. The HB 3 that made that possible was a really important policy move. What would be helpful is the easier we can make that system. Because the school system and the child care system operate on completely different systems and policies and regulations and funding, creating those partnerships can be very challenging because it’s not easy to understand how to translate the regulations that the schools are required into a child care center and vice versa. 

Anything that the legislature can do to make that a more seamless process and make it easier for both the superintendents to say yes and to the child care providers to say yes, because what we often hear is a superintendent’s like, “That’s a great idea. I’d love to deliver pre-K in a child care center, but I don’t know anything about child care, and I don’t really want to know anything about child care and all the regulations.” Child care providers say the same thing. They’re like, “This sounds like a great idea, but I don’t really understand the funding. I don’t know what I should be getting from this. I don’t understand the school regulations, so I’m not sure I can take that on, because I’m already stressed enough.” 

MORGAN SMITH: There’s another issue. HB3 required school districts to provide full-day pre-K to eligible students, which was a big step forward. But unfortunately, lawmakers only provided funding for a half-day, leaving school districts to make up the difference — and six years later, that’s where funding remains. Here is Michelle Rinehart again.

MICHELLE RINEHART: When we think about what pre-K looks like in practice, we don’t pay a pre-K teacher half of a teaching salary. We actually spend more on staff salaries in those classrooms because we equip those classrooms both with a teacher and a paraprofessional. And so those classrooms are our most expensive classrooms to run across the district. When you walk into a pre-K classroom, you won’t find that it’s only half furnished, or that we only run the heat and AC half the time, or that we only supply half of our students with the materials that they need to access pre-K. But these are the very real impacts of what half-day funding could look like in pre-K classrooms.

MORGAN SMITH: And, as Texas looks to the future, the benefits of fully funding pre-K extend beyond just the improved educational outcomes. Here’s David Feigen. 

DAVID FEIGEN: I would say that the legislature, I think, is highly motivated to act on child care this session because of this economic impact. And according to the US Chamber of Commerce, Texas only has 80 available workers for every 100 open jobs. Let me say that again. Texas only has 80 available workers for every 100 open jobs. And what that means is there are more open jobs than available workers. And one of the main reasons for that is child care. According to surveys, we’ve seen around 60% of non-working parents say that child care is a top barrier to them working. And so lawmakers are motivated about this because there’s a significant economic impact of the lack of high-quality child care. And people don’t talk about pre-K that way, but it’s part of this too. We just take for granted that the public education system is an economic driver that parents, once their child enters kindergarten, can rely on full-day child care. But in these early years, parents are really struggling, and that’s having a real economic impact. And so I would just say that if lawmakers want Texas to be this economic miracle, we need to ensure that parents have access to high-quality child care because that’s absolutely holding the economy back. 

MORGAN SMITH: Thank you for listening. To stay informed on critical education issues this Session, you can sign up online for Raise Your Hand Texas’ Across the Lawn Weekly Newsletter at www.RaiseYourHandTexas.org/get-involved. Today’s episode was written by me, Morgan Smith. Our sound engineer is Brian Diggs, and our executive producer is Anne Lasseigne Tiedt. 

Thank you for listening to Intersect Ed. If you want to learn more about how to support Texas public education or how to get involved, head over to RaiseYourHandTexas.org.