By the numbers
400: Preschoolers that will attend Clark Center next year.
$1.17 million: State grant awarded to Springfield schools for 2016-17.
17,215: Preschool slots funded by Early Childhood Education grants statewide.
$70 million: Total state budget allocation for early childhood education in Fiscal Year 17.
Early Childhood Education grants awarded by Ohio for the 2016-17 school year:
Madison Champaign Educational Service Center: $136,000 to fund 34 slots across Mechanicsburg, Triad, West Liberty-Salem and West Jefferson school districts.
Urbana City Schools: $232,000 for 58 slots at two preschool locations.
Clark County Early Childhood Education Center: $160,000 for 40 slots.
Miami Valley Child Development Centers Inc.: $652,000 for 163 slots across five Head Start centers.
Springfield Christian School: $240,000 for 60 slots.
Springfield City School District: $1.17 million for 293 slots.
Hundreds of preschoolers in the Springfield City School District will be able to attend classes for free next year as it plans to spend $2.4 million on early childhood education.
The commitment to fund free preschool beyond what state grants cover comes from the district’s belief that it’s the key to turning around poor test scores, Superintendent Bob Hill said.
“Philosophically and based on current research, the district strongly supports and is willing to invest in the effects of early childhood education,” he said.
But new research studying Tennessee’s public preschool has questioned the long-term value of early education programs. Hill, though, said it will be critical for a district like Springfield.
“In a high poverty district, it is vitally important to provide preschool opportunities to allow all students to enter kindergarten on equal footing,” he said.
Springfield failed to meet a single performance indicator on the state report card each of the past two years.
Springfield was awarded nearly $1.2 million from the Ohio Department of Education to serve 293 economically disadvantaged 4-year-olds through both Head Start classrooms and the district’s in-house preschool program.
Three other early childhood programs in Clark County and two in Champaign County received grants as well.
The grant allocates $4,000 per student, which is about $2,000 less than the district is paid per-student in kindergarten through 12th grade.
Springfield will serve 400 students — five Head Start classrooms and 17 preschool classrooms — at the Clark Center next year, including some 3-year-olds who will no longer be covered by the state’s Early Childhood Education grant and students who don’t qualify for state funding because of income.
Hill said the move is in line with the district’s effort to eliminate all fees. Springfield doesn’t charge any sports fees, doesn’t charge students to take AP or IB tests, and stopped charging for band camp.
“We recognize the high rate of poverty and the situation that our kids are in and we’re really trying to provide them with all possible opportunities,” he said.
The district previously charged $50 per month for preschool, less than half the price of some private programs in the area. But there were families that still struggled, according to Deb Accurso, preschool principal.
“When it’s between your electric bill and tuition, what are you going to choose?” she said.
“Denying a kid the opportunity for a year’s worth of schooling that their peers are going to receive based on the fact that they don’t have $50 a month it’s unconscionable to me,” Hill said.
The district will have to re-examine its ability to provide free preschool each year based on grant money that comes in.
Eventually Hill would like to see every student in the district attending a high quality pre-school program. That would be about 700 students each year, making space an issue.
The state still doesn’t factor in preschool classrooms when funding building projects, but Ohio has increased its spending on early childhood education with $70 million allocated in the most recent budget.
“From state fiscal year 2014 to fiscal year 2017, Ohio has nearly tripled the funding for the number of high quality publicly funded preschool slots (from 5,700 to over 17,000),” ODE spokeswoman Brittany Halpin said.
The state’s spending commitment shows it believes in the benefits of preschool, Hill said.
“To get them to take that next step to say preschool is an essential part of the K-12 education system, making it the PK-12 education system, that’s the leap that has to happen,” he said.
Although numerous studies have touted the positive effects preschool has on student achievement, recent research into Tennessee’s voluntary, universal pre-kindergarten program has called into question the long-term effectiveness of publicly funded preschool.
Tennessee’s program began in 2005 and is similar in size to Ohio’s. The state allocates $85 million to school districts to operate 935 classrooms serving more than 18,000 4-year-olds each year.
Researchers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of education and human development set out to determine what the return on that investment was in terms of academic performance.
They found children attending the program made greater gains on a range of achievement measures and were rated by their kindergarten teachers as better prepared for kindergarten. However, by the end of kindergarten, the children who didn’t attend pre-K had caught up and there were no longer significant differences between the two groups.
More recent results showed that by the end of second grade and continuing in third, the children who attended the state-funded programs weren’t performing as well on many of the achievement measures as those who didn’t attend.
“We’re pretty stunned looking at these data and have a lot of questions about what might be going on in the later grades,” co-investigator Mark Lipsey said in a statement about the findings.
One issue the researchers brought up is varying quality across programs.
Ohio has been working to expand its ratings program for early childhood providers called Step Up to Quality. The voluntary program is designed to separate real preschools that teach skills for success in kindergarten and beyond from daycare centers that essentially babysit.
All state-funded providers will be required to get a rating at some point and Springfield is waiting for its program to be audited by the state to get a rating.
Springfield hasn’t done any longitudinal studies of whether students in its program perform better on kindergarten readiness assessments or standardized tests once in school but they plan to, Hill said.
From his personal experience with son, Cooper, the results are obvious.
“He was in half-day preschool last year when we were in Cleveland … and he was eligible for kindergarten (here), but we decided to do preschool again full-day,” Hill said. “I have seen him grow leaps and bounds over the course of this year.”
Amy Day teaches preschool at Clark Center and said she sees students who come into her classroom so far behind their age level they still may not be caught up in time for kindergarten, but the playing field is leveled significantly.
“Every kid in Springfield needs to be here to try to start stopping this cycle of low test scores,” she said.
The district isn’t able to offer transportation for preschool students at this point, Hill said, but wants to look into whether transportation or the availability of latchkey programs would increase participation further.
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