STILL NOT TOP PRIORITY: An Arkansas preschool teacher in an Early Head Start reads to children in this 2013 file photo. BRIAN CHILSON


Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families
has a new brief out today on the pre-K situation in Arkansas, and how it’s changed in the past year.

The report is optimistic, noting that a $60 million federal grant (to be disbursed over a four year period) has made possible an expansion of 1,371 new preschool slots statewide, along with a significant increase in per-child funding for another 1,506 children. The federal money is intended to increase the quality of pre-K programs in specific, high-need areas, including the Little Rock School District. 

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The W.K. Kellogg Foundation also funded two $1 million initiatives intended to boost quality in Arkansas kindergarten and pre-K classrooms, and the state legislature added a one-time $3 million to the Arkansas Better Chance program for the next two fiscal years. ABC provides free or reduced-cost pre-K to low-income families.

The one-time money from the state budget, the report notes, “is the first increase in funding to the ABC program since FY 2008 when $40 million of ongoing revenue was added to increase quality and enrollment. While this $3 million is a first step for enriching the quality of our program, it is just that, a first step. The program needs a significant amount of ongoing revenue to ensure that it maintains the high quality that kids need in order to start their schooling off on the right foot.”

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The Republican legislature is more interested in tax cuts which accrue largely to the wealthy than in significantly increasing the pre-K budget. The extra $3 million the General Assembly appropriated earlier this year is welcome, of course, but it shouldn’t be oversold. It falls far short of what’s needed.

Arkansas’s pre-K budget effectively shrank, in real terms, since 2008 — a span of time in which Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe set the state’s budget priorities along with Republican legislative leaders, it should be noted. As William El-Amin wrote in a Times column in April, $3 million is only a fraction of what would have been required to keep pace with inflation over the past seven years.

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The money kicked in by the state looks even more paltry when compared to the federal grant mentioned in the Advocates report. A sum of $60 million over four years works out to about $15 million per year, which is ten times higher than the amount Arkansas could cough up on an annual basis ($3 million over two years is $1.5 million per year).

So is this progress? When compared to 2014, sure. But not when compared to 2008. That would require a real investment of state revenue, something the legislature is so far averse to doing.

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