Bredesen signs law funding pre-kindergarten in Tennessee
This first installment is expected to pay for about 300 classrooms for some 6,000 poor or at-risk 4-year-olds. That would triple the number of children already served by a state pilot program, but still represents only a fraction of the estimated 37,000 disadvantaged pre-kindergarteners in the state.
“We are going to continue growing this program to the point where every child in our state — every 4-year-old whose parents want to them to be in a program like this — has access to it. That is my goal,” the governor vowed.
Although some counties are delaying participation because they lack facilities for pre-K classes, the state Department of Education says it already has received inquiries for nearly 400 classrooms. Bredesen said he wants to fill all requests, if only through partial funding next year.
The governor said he plans to return to the General Assembly each year with a request for $25 million from the lottery, plus an increase from normal revenue growth. He hopes to have the program fully funded by the time he leaves office in six years, assuming he is re-elected.
“I look at this a little like paying down a mortgage. Every year you do a little bit and you wake up one day and suddenly you have a lot of equity in your house. I want to do that with education. I think we will look up in four, five, six years from now and there will be an absolute national model pre-K program in our state.”
Seven months after proposing the expanded preschool program, Bredesen traveled to Johnson City, Knoxville and Memphis on Thursday to ceremonially sign the measure into law.
“I would never have imagined the outpouring of support and hard work from people in all corners of Tennessee to work to make this dream a reality,” he told a classroom filled with children’s advocates and local officials at My Village, a former elementary school in a hardscrabble section of Knoxville that has been revived as a nonprofit child development center for infants to fifth-graders.
“I think any funding we can get is a very wonderful thing,” said Scarlett Househunter, the center’s pre-K teacher. “And I am really, really happy that people are beginning to see the importance of preschool. For so many years, we were considered baby sitters.”
Househunter’s 17 pre-kindergarteners entertained the audience with a little song about five “green speckled frogs” that involved math. With each verse, another frog jumped in a pond and the 4-year-olds had to subtract them until they were all gone.
Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam called pre-K a key to the future.
“The bottom line is this,” he said, “In Tennessee, if we are going to compete we have to have more kids graduate from high school and more kids go to college. And if they are going to do that, they are going to (need) a great early start.”
The state said outfitting and staffing a pre-K classroom costs $101,149. The state will provide on average about 75 percent of that, depending on a county’s financial situation.
Education Commissioner Lana Seviers said the state will be flexible in determining a local match, particularly involving space for classrooms, which could be at a school, a church or a YMCA. Regardless of where the classes are held, she said, it will be the same state curriculum taught be certified teachers for a minimum of 5 1/2 hours a day.
“I would like this to be just the beginning, not only of understanding and showing how pre-K programs transform children’s lives but also their parents’ lives,” said Stephen Clark, a Chattanooga advocate with the group Stand for Children. “It is going to benefit generations.”