St. Paul pre-K funding proposal will be studied instead of passed on to voters this fall
City council votes to create an advisory committee to study details of early childhood education plan
The St. Paul City Council on Wednesday voted to create a legislative advisory committee to evaluate a taxpayer-funded early childhood education program.
“This is an exciting moment and a really big day for St. Paul kids, parents, grandparents, caregivers, employers and our community at large,” said St. Paul City Council member Rebecca Noecker.
Noecker has championed the early education effort — a program called Saint Paul All Ready for Kindergarten, or SPARK. It’s an early childhood education initiative that would pay for or subsidize early learning and child care for St. Paul residents. When it’s up and running, proponents say, families of four making $51,000 per year or less would have their early education costs completely covered. That, according to advocates, could help more than half of the city’s 3- and 4-year-olds. Families with higher incomes would have their pre-K costs subsidized.
“Right now we are failing too many of our kids right when they need us most. Most brain development happens before children turn 5, so those early years are when it’s most important for kids to be in high-quality early learning settings. But those are the years when families are most stressed, most cost-burdened and when they get the least support,” Noecker said.
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Some council members have raised concerns the proposal needs more work, including in defining standards for care providers participating in the program. Council member Mitra Jalali, who’s a co-sponsor of the committee proposal, said more time was needed to work out program details.
“What I think is really important for this initiative and this idea at this stage is fleshing out a lot of the specifics and doing that in a way where there’s buy-in and transparency and accountability and clarity in a 360 degree way about something as important as our children,” Jalali said, adding she thought she did “want to address what’s ultimately a gap in our community and an area of tremendous need.”
Minnesota already has several programs that address early learning and child care for families. There’s Head Start — an early childhood program targeted at low-income and homeless families, that draws on both state and federal funding. The Childcare Assistance Program or child care development block grant draws on state and federal money to give financial help to low-income families looking for employment. School-based programs get mostly local funds to run district-based early education programs.
Minnesota also has early learning scholarships that are awarded to qualifying families to use at Parent-Aware rated programs.
Still, most of the programs, excluding the state’s early learning scholarships, do not cover the cost of child care for many families who need it. That’s according to Cisa Keller who’s a senior vice president at Think Small, an early childhood advocacy organization. For one thing, much of the funding focuses on child care providers, not families.
“The child care assistance, the Head Start and the school-based program is really funding that, for the most part really just goes to the provider, and doesn’t necessarily follow the child,” Keller said. “Because we don’t have significant public funds to support early childhood, what’s happening is it’s parents who are having to fill in the gap. Some are able to … but many are not.”
Not only is it expensive for families, many providers have struggled or had to close their doors during the pandemic. A recent national report found Minnesota’s state funding for child care decreased by about 8 percent since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — as did the quality of education in its early learning centers.
“There was already a decline pre-pandemic. But COVID really took a hit on child care providers across the country,” Keller said. “We’re seeing providers that are not only leaving the field, but we’re also not seeing the number of providers that are interested in coming into the field. We’re just seeing an overall decrease.”
What’s more, the programs that exist to help families pay for child care, do not have enough funding to assist everyone who needs it. Keller said state-funded early learning scholarships, for example, have left out more than 30,000 children who qualify and need the money.
“We just don’t have enough funding. It’s just not enough. We have a wait list in every single community,” Keller said.
This is one of the big reasons Keller believes the SPARK program could be a good solution for St. Paul.
“I’m really excited that St. Paul is putting this priority on making sure that families have the financial resources to be able to access high-quality child care,” Keller said.
For City Council member Noecker the program is also an important equity initiative. She argued, if passed, it would “allow parents to work if they choose to, to make sure we have gender equity in the workforce, to make sure employers have reliable child care for their employees. And just to make sure that our economy and our families are able to thrive.”
SPARK would rely on a levy for funds. The tax hike would cost the average family $19.94 in the first year, according to Noecker. But the levy would increase incrementally over several years as the program expands. It’s meant to focus on lower-income families at first, as well as those coming out of incarceration, struggling with homelessness or who are highly mobile. Ninety percent of funds would go directly towards services and subsidies with 10 percent directed toward administration.
Proponents say the funding mechanism is the first of its kind in the state, although other cities in other parts of the country have introduced similar programs including Seattle, New Orleans and Cincinnati, among others.
The original plan had been to get a question on the November 2022 ballot that would allow St. Paul residents a chance to vote themselves on whether to put a levy in place to fund SPARK.
The committee is expected to report its results to the council early next year with the intention to have a ballot proposal ready to put in front of voters in fall of 2023.