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Fewer Preschool Programs Foretell a Bleak Future
By Deborah Williams
Low-income kindergarten students who have not been enrolled in a quality preschool program tend to be about 18 months behind their peers. For this reason, public education has expanded the number of preschool programs across the nation until they became one of the casualties of the budget cuts that school systems have had to address.
Kimberly Hefling writes on The Huffington Post website in her article, “Public Pre-Kindergarten Programs Slowed, Even Reversed, by Recession,” that the current budget cuts mean that many three- and four-year-olds are not going to preschool.
Research shows that many of these students will start far behind their peers, never catch up, end up in exceptional education classes, and often drop out of school. Usually, students are eligible if they qualify for free or reduced lunch, but in this economy more students fall into that category; however, there are not enough slots to accommodate them.
The future is bleak for these children because, according to Billy Easton, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education in Albany, New York, “more of them will end up out of work or they will make less money than they would’ve otherwise and more of them will end up in prison.”
Here’s an example of how this situation is hurting Michigan preschoolers:
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