Nearly half of California’s currently eligible 4-year-olds would lose their eligibility to enroll in transitional kindergarten in 2015 if a bill that passed the Senate last week gets the governor’s approval.
State Senate President Pro Tem Darrel Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduced a much revisedSenate Bill 837 on the floor of the Senate last week. The bill would expand transitional kindergarten, a program for children who turn 5 in the first few months of the school year, but not as much as he’d proposed earlier this year.
Steinberg originally proposed expanding the program to all 4-year-olds, adding a full year of schooling for all children before they enter kindergarten. The latest version of the bill would expand transitional kindergarten only to low-income 4-year-olds. That means children currently slated to start transitional kindergarten in 2015 whose families fall above the low-income threshold would no longer be eligible to attend the program.
Following the introduction of a bill to expand transitional kindergarten to all 4-year-olds in January 2014, transitional kindergarten teacher Michelle Cazel-Mayo’s classroom at H.W. Harkness Elementary School in Sacramento gets a visit from the media. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource
“We have an opportunity this year with a relatively limited amount of public dollars to provide,” preschool for 4-year-olds from low-income families, Steinberg told the Senate before the bill passed 26-10. “This pared down version (of the) bill would still cover half of 4-year-olds in California because half are low-income.”
Steinberg’s office declined a request for an interview until the joint meetings between the Assembly and Senate education budget committees have resulted in a joint early childhood budget proposal.
The current proposed expansion would double the size of the current transitional program and some advocates argue it’s the best way to spend limited funds.
“We have no evidence that (preschool) gives a boost to middle class white kids,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley who studies early childhood education. “A universal program, yes, could help poor kids. But essentially we’d (also) be wasting money on (middle class) kids who don’t benefit that much.”
Still, many families who don’t qualify as low-income have been expecting that their children would be participating in transitional kindergarten under the proposed law.
“I was…supportive of the universal preschool proposal and would be…willing to pay more in taxes to fund universal preschool,” Amalia Cunningham, a middle class mom from El Cerrito, north of Oakland, said by email.
Cunningham’s 3-year-old daughter would have been eligible to attend transitional kindergarten in the fall of 2015 under the current guidelines allowing children born in the first three months of the school year to enroll. That, Cunningham said, was a prospect she looked forward to. Under the Thousands would lose eligibility for transitional kindergarten under revised bill | EdSource Today: