One of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s biggest legislative push this year is to establish a free pre-K system for families who make less than $100,000 annually. Will it happen?
WSHU’s Ebong Udoma spoke with CT Mirror’s Laura Tillman to discuss her article, “Will Lamont’s universal pre-K plan prevail?” as part of the collaborative podcast Long Story Short. Read Laura’s story here.
WSHU: Hello, Laura. What's the obstacle to universal pre-K in Connecticut? And what's Lamont’s ambitious plan to tackle the problem? How does he want to finance it?
LT: Oh, there are so many problems really. I mean, it's an area where there's not enough workforce. The salaries are low. There are not enough spots. I think that there's a lot of financial pressure in Connecticut to build a business in general, just the cost of, you know, real estate and utilities and that makes things expensive for anyone. So there are a lot of forces that are working against this, but it's a really important issue, because it's needed to build the workforce across all kinds of sectors. People can't get back to work because they can't find childcare. And then, you know, pre-K also is something that while there are some districts where there are free programs through public schools, a lot of people are left paying quite a lot for those services and those schools.
So Ned Lamont’s plan for this is to create a universal pre-K endowment. This would use surplus funds up to $300 million a year, sock those away into this endowment, and then 10% of that money could be used each year to pay for things like increasing salaries, building capacity, renovating classrooms, if needed, in public schools to serve as pre-K classrooms; it could be transportation needs in some areas of the state where it's hard to get to new or existing schools, so trying to kind of fill in all of these gaps. Ultimately, families making up to $100,000 a year would pay nothing for pre-K. Some of those families have already been captured through CARE for Kids funding. But this would make families up to 100k a year without paying anything. And then families making up to $150,000 a year would only pay $20 a day.
WSHU: Wow.
LT: And families making more than that would still have to pay. But I guess the logic of this is that, you know, families making more than that would hypothetically be able to figure this out in their budget to pay for it.
WSHU: Now, the building block from which this will be done is this $300 million a year in surplus money put into this endowment. Are we going to have $300 million a year into the future in surplus money to start with? Where do we stand as far as surplus is concerned, and how much surplus can actually be put towards this?
LT: Yeah, it's a difficult question. I mean, it's a moving target. You know, the state has an enormous budget, and so in some ways, you could call this kind of a rounding error that there's, you know, that the state estimates what it needs for all kinds of things. And then some months we take in more money than is expected, and some months, we have more costs than are expected and less. I think the big fear right now about this dependency on surplus funding is that we're currently watching a lot of upheaval at the federal level over different kinds of funding that are being cut that then affects the state's budget. And so if there isn't enough federal funding to pay for SNAP benefits, for example, to pay for reduced price lunches in schools, to pay for housing grants and all kinds of things that we get from the federal government, then will there really be much money left over at all for something like a preschool endowment?
I think that in Lamont's address about the budget in February, he made this remark that, you know, soon, in a few years, this endowment could reach a billion dollars. And one of the things he said was, “President Trump willing,” so I think that he's even acknowledged, you know, that this is really not a certainty. I think that there's still hope that there would be some surplus, and over time, that money would grow in this endowment, even if they're not able to reach as much money as they intended, that this is something that, you know, over time, will start to build, and hopefully, we'll be able to pay for this, whether it's by, you know, kicking things into gear by 2028 and 2032 as the plan suggests, or whether that is in a few more years after that remains to be seen.
WSHU: And that's part of the criticism that's coming from the pre-K community. Could you tell us how they're taking the plan right now? What's their take on what's going on here, and will it solve the problem?
LT: I think that there's a lot of gratitude from the advocacy community about Lamont's plan. So one thing to know is that his plan comes from this Blue Ribbon Panel report in 2023, where there was a huge effort led by the Office of Early Childhood Commissioner Beth Bye to make an in-depth assessment of, you know, just what this sector needed to be fixed. And there was a lot of input. There were a lot of studies that went into that they proposed this, you know, they proposed these changes in a Blue Ribbon Panel report to the tune of about $2 billion with a five-year plan. So there's been a lot of momentum and and research leading up to now, and I think that there's an appreciation by the early childhood child care community, that this plan derives from that report and that commitment to try and start fixing some things.
I think one of the big concerns that they have expressed is that there's nothing in the Governor's plan that addresses infant and toddler care. So you have a lot of people who, when they have a baby, they leave the workforce, and then they, you know, intend to come back. I talked to one woman for this story who intended to come back in a couple of years, and then found that she really couldn't afford full-time pre-K when her child reached that age, and so was left with a pre-K that was six hours a week of pre-K, which, as anybody knows, is not enough time to be able to hold down any kind of job in those hours. So this is one of the big concerns, and partly this is because there are currently so few spots in the state for infant and toddler care, and so there's a worry that that's really the piece of this whole system that is in crisis and needs to be fixed right away.
And I think that, on the other hand, they understand why pre-K is being taken on first. For one thing, there is a bunch of pre-K availability in the state, and so building up that system into something “universal” is hypothetically possible to achieve in the next 5-10 years, whereas infant and toddler care is a much bigger issue to bite off and probably would be a lot more difficult. There have been some proposals on the table. For example, there's a bill out there that proposes to help pay for this, pay for infant and toddler care, by creating a new tax on employers. Large for-profit employers would pay a 1.5% payroll tax under that plan, which is not a particularly popular plan with the business community in Connecticut, for obvious reasons, but I think, you know, there are some concerns about the fact that this, you know, infant and toddler area is in crisis.
There's also this dynamic where, in these private childcare centers, the infant and toddler care that they currently run is run sometimes at a loss financially, but they actually are able to supplement that through the pre-K. One of the things that this community actually likes about the governor's plan is its emphasis on maintaining pre-K through those private centers, in addition to building capacity in public schools if needed in different areas. So the idea is to save the parts of the sector that exist and build on those.
There's another plan on the table from the Senate Democrats, which in Senate Bill 1 would look to expand more pre-K spaces, and there's a concern that that plan would potentially put too much emphasis on public school pre-K, and whether that would decimate this private sector. So there are a lot of ways that these issues of infant and toddler care and pre-K are deeply interconnected. And it's kind of this complex organism that if you start playing with fixing one piece of it, you might damage the other. So there are concerns about, I think, just like a lot of these complex dynamics that are at work here.
WSHU: There's also a complaint that it's not universal, because there's a cap at $150,000. What's been the response to that?
LT: Yeah, I spoke to one parent in Orange. She has three kids right now, so she's under an extraordinary amount of pressure in this situation. She's got three kids, and all three of them right now need either pre-K or infant and toddler care. And she and her husband both have good jobs. You know, he's an engineer. She is in international communications for the Bic pen company. They came to Connecticut from the south. They had been living in Atlanta and were from North Carolina before that, and so they set down roots here because they really found good jobs here. And they felt that the politics of this region of the country were more in alignment with their own beliefs. And so they came here, and years later, started building a family, bought a house recently in Orange, and they're just finding that, even with these good jobs that they have, even making more than $150,000 a year, that they're really struggling.
I mean, they're shopping at Goodwill, they've changed grocery stores, and they don't enroll their kids in, you know, music lessons or these kinds of things. They're really kind of living very frugally right now. I think that they were quick to say that all of these kinds of things, like choosing which grocery store you go to, are kind of privileged dilemmas that they're facing. And you know, in a few years, their kids will get to start in the public school in Orange, but right now they're really feeling the pinch, and they're kind of like, you know, why is the middle class always being left out here? This doesn't feel so universal to a family like ours, when we're paying over $40,000 a year for these childcare costs and we're really struggling.
WSHU: But in the meantime, there's a growing momentum to have something passed this year. So it looks good that we'll have some kind of bill that will pass by the end of the session.
LT: I think so. The fact that this is in Senate Bill 1, the fact that this is also, you know, the governor's priority in his budget address, it was the first issue that he mentioned in that whole address of what he wants to get done. He also recently did an interview at a public event with the Connecticut Mirror, where he was asked what issue he'd most like to solve, and he named this issue. So I think that there is a lot of will, and there's also a sense that, yeah, there might not be a surplus this year, or the surplus might not be as big as hope for this year, or that kind of thing, but that if we can kind of put this in motion now, this is a fund that will, over time, build, and this is a legacy that he could hypothetically leave behind to have something like this funded.
So I think that there is a lot of will, and there's also a sense that, you know, this is just not a tremendously controversial issue, that young children should be ready to go to kindergarten. There was also this disconnected youth report that came out from Dalio Education, which looked at this issue of young men and women who are not in the workforce and who are not going to school. What's causing that? What's causing this disconnected youth phenomenon? And a big piece of of that was pointing to this idea that when those children even start kindergarten, they're already far behind their peers that they start out kindergarten; they may not have been read to at home, they may not have had much social interaction, and then they start out in school, and they're kind of behind their peers already.
And so I think that there is this kind of will that's been gathering from many directions about the idea that this isn't this is just an issue that is to everyone's betterment, to deal with now, and that in the long term, pays dividends in terms of, you know, having people more prepared to enter the workforce, having parents who are able to go back to work sooner. There are just a lot of different ways that this adds value to society. And so I think because of that, there's not much in, you know, opposition to the concept itself of making this happen.
WSHU: The only problem is how much of a hit we get from federal spending cuts.
LT: Right.
