Governor Abbott expanded pre-K for children in need. Beto O’Rourke wants to expand it more

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke is reupping campaign positions on early childhood education and pre-kindergarten he has used throughout past campaigns, including his bid for president in 2020.

Those positions include expanding universal pre-K and increasing the amount of subsidies given to providers by the government to help sustain quality child care.

O’Rourke’s opponent in the Nov. 8 election, incumbent Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has touted his funding of pre-K programs throughout this and past campaigns, noting through a spokesperson that he “declared early education his first emergency item as Governor in 2015, resulting in a law that set aside $130 million over two years for school districts that bolstered their pre-K programs.”

He also signed a law in 2019 funding full-day pre-K for students in poverty as part of a larger school finance bill.

O’Rourke told the Star-Telegram at a recent campaign stop that he wants to expand the programs for all students, not just those in need.

But child care workers, then and now, are wary of the implications expanding public school pre-K on a state-wide level could have on existing businesses.

“I think universal pre-K sounds like a really easy solution,‘‘ said Audrey Rowland, CEO of Green Space Learning in Fort Worth. “We’re really forgetting about a lot of the pieces that private schools serve, like before- and after-school care, holiday care and care for infants and toddlers.”

Those concerns have led to pushback from local child care providers and advocates as a growing number of schools provide free pre-K for all children. That concern was also echoed by an Iowa child care provider speaking at a Beto campaign event in 2019.

“If you take away the 3- or 4-year-olds, we are no longer viable,” child care provider Deborah VanderGaast told O’Rourke according to a local news report.

A solution, Rowland said, would need to be comprehensive — and include considerations for the entire family unit, including infants and toddlers.

Democratic candidate says he will listen to providers

When asked about the possible negative implications, highlighted in studies following the introduction of universal pre-K in places like Fort Worth, O’Rourke said he would listen to those impacted by the change.

“I don’t think there’s a solution, at least not a good one without bringing everyone affected around the table,” O’Rourke said. “These centers, and these early childhood education providers, and these pre K classroom educators, they know this better than I ever will, and I need to learn from them. So they’re going to devise a solution.”

How they would do that could vary widely depending on who you ask.

The consensus by top early education providers and school leaders in Fort Worth would be some sort of mixed-delivery system, where school-based care coexists with the rest of the child care ecosystem.

Any long-term solution, however, would require an overhaul of the business model keeping private child care afloat — where centers have to care for classrooms full of preschool-aged children in order to afford to care for infants.

Fix would require overhaul of child care market

Child care providers provide care for infants, toddlers and preschool-aged children.

But they can only care for four infants at a time, while they can care for up to 18 preschool-aged children, according to state child care regulations.

Dan Wuori, senior director of early learning at the Hunt Institute, said this “upside-down economic problem” of child care is what makes the universal pre-K question so tricky.

“It’s almost impossible for providers to provide infant care in particular, in a way that realistically even breaks even,” Wuori told the Star-Telegram in April. “The way that child care … compensates for that loss of income, essentially … is through services to older children, where there is a little bit more of an opportunity with larger groups of preschoolers, to teach them something.”

Pre-K expansion hurt child care industry in Fort Worth

A 2015 micro-study by Camp Fire First Texas, an education nonprofit that works with Fort Worth schools as well as early learning centers, found that there were unintended consequences when Fort Worth schools rolled out universal pre-K in 2014.

In the study, 80% of child care centers reported an impact on the financial stability of their program and 18% of all providers reported that without the 4-year-olds in their program, they are likely to close.

Other unintended consequences included rising tuition and a decline in quality for private providers.

Seven years after the study, not much has changed, Lyn Lucas, the former senior vice president of early education and program evaluation at Camp Fire First, told the Star-Telegram in April.

“What the cost modeling looks like for child care has not changed,” she said. “And because there haven’t been any significant changes, ... we felt those consequences and we really felt it through COVID. Now there’s a child care crisis, because we are just really slow and reticent to do the hard work of fixing the bigger problem, which is the system and putting the supports in at a large level.”

With no changes to the system, the impacts are likely to be replicated in other communities where universal pre-K is introduced, Lucas said.

Child care ‘not in a good spot’

Despite the concerns over universal pre-K, Rowland said there is a need for serious changes at the state and local level when it comes to child care.

“We are not in a good spot in early child care right now,” she said. “That’s a result of lots of factors, but we’ve had major reductions in just the number of programs that are still open and an increase in the number of communities that have no child care.”

A series of longstanding issues in the industry including low pay, few or no benefits and long hours were compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shuttered buildings and cratered the early learning workforce, which has been slower than other industries to recover.

That slow recovery has held back recovery in other industries as parents look to return to work and can’t find places for their children, or have to dole out thousands of dollars a year to do so.

“Child care (workers) are paid so little that we end up kind of being an employer of women in poverty,” Rowland said. “That’s kind of undermining the purpose of the industry, which is to allow for better opportunities for families.”

Investments focused on child care businesses

Historic investments during the pandemic have focused on keeping businesses open and providing support for the small business owners who run child care centers and homes, Rowland said — but the contributions to help parents who can’t afford child care have been lacking.

“Child care is really kind of a private public good, like agriculture — we need it, but you can’t make a living doing it,” she said. “So the federal government has to support it, in order for it to work.”

With parents paying more than the cost of college to send their children to be cared for by teachers who can’t be paid more than minimum wage, Rowland said, the state should do more to increase subsidies to make the burden less on both sides.

O’Rourke said in an interview with the Star-Telegram that he would support increasing the subsidy amount.

“Let’s increase the reimbursement rates for these centers,” he said. “Because in whatever system, they’re still going to be providing really necessary care. And many of the workers there, as you know, are making just above the minimum wage themselves, and themselves cannot afford child care or pre K for their kids.”

Rowland said that move is a necessity to having quality child care.

“The state is in charge of what amount of money is paid out to child care centers in the form of subsidies and those continue to be far too low because they’re based on the market price rather than the actual cost of providing the care,” she said. “Until we adjust that subsidy rate to support quality care, we’re going to continue to just leave child care centers underfunded, particularly those that serve our most vulnerable populations.”