After universal preschool’s launch, how will Colorado resolve problems facing parents and schools?

When Colorado’s universal preschool program was set to launch, Carly Sargent-Knudson looked forward to full days in the classroom for 4-year-old Rune, paid for entirely by the state.

She qualifies for a specialized education plan to help with speech development, checking a box the state said would make Sargent-Knudson’s daughter eligible for 30 hours per week of free class time, double what’s guaranteed to all children. But facing a flood of demand, the state made a late-summer change that added household income limits at a middle-class level for the extra time, regardless of other qualifying factors.

For Sargent-Knudson’s family, “free” ended up costing close to $800 a month to get the full 30 hours — an unforeseen expense that has resulted in the Boulder County family cutting back on groceries, changing cell phone carriers and otherwise scrimping. That’s what they say it’s taking to afford “the best educational foundation” for Rune.

“And it’s wild to say that about public education,” Sargent-Knudson said. “I’m not talking about a private Montessori school — I’m talking about the public school down the street.”

The family’s excitement for the launch of Colorado’s universal preschool program was echoed across the state this spring and summer as parents raced to sign up. While nearly 50,000 3- and 4-year-olds in total were successfully enrolled by the fall, almost 11,000 families ended up in the same boat as Sargent-Knudson — watching what seemed like a promise of extra hours beyond the standard 15 evaporate just weeks before classes began in August, despite thinking their children qualified.

It was a critical example of what one lawmaker described as state officials overpromising and underdelivering, and it happened on a signature initiative of Gov. Jared Polis, who campaigned on universal preschool during his first first run for governor in 2018. State education officials responsible for the rollout have rushed to fix some of the glitches and problems, which have ranged from barriers created by the state’s online enrollment system to shortchanged payments for some schools to new uncertainties for private providers.

Officials have pledged to figure out longer-term solutions for next year, including with a new proposed rule that would make more students from low-income families eligible for full-day classes at the state’s expense.

But with some problems still unresolved, the governor and state lawmakers are facing pressure to uphold the $322 million program’s promise, given the stakes involved for children’s development.

“Yes, more people were able to take advantage of free preschool — that is a fact that we cannot deny,” said state Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, who chairs the legislature’s powerful Joint Budget Committee and described state officials as underdelivering on the program. “That is a success worth celebrating. … The reason why we’re so concerned with these issues is we all agree that it’s an important and worthwhile endeavor.

“But we cannot rest on our laurels, and we cannot wipe our hands and say we’re all done.”

The bumpy implementation came after years of preparation. After Polis became governor, two-thirds of voters in 2020 approved new tobacco and nicotine taxes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the preschool program’s launch. The promise then was to provide a minimum of 10 hours of seat time per week for every child during the year before kindergarten at private preschools as well as the public school down the street.

By November 2022, state officials had raised the standard limit to 15 hours, confident they could pay for it — even while offering up to 30 hours to thousands of children who have special education needs or who face economic hardship or language barriers.

Then came the financial crunch as it became clear that they’d underestimated the demand: While officials predicted early on that the families of about 50% of eligible 4-year-olds would sign up in the program’s first year, enrollment has reached about 60% participation, with thousands of 3-year-olds also approved.

Polis has celebrated the program’s popularity, but the shortcomings in the rollout during the summer and fall have undercut its success.

The online-only enrollment system initially barred families from directly signing up with their preschools of choice. Homeless families couldn’t automatically qualify for extra hours beyond the standard 15. There weren’t enough resources to help Spanish-speaking families, and others who don’t speak English, navigate the new system at the outset.

Some private preschools eager to take part planned their budgets around students — and state tuition dollars — that never arrived, while public school executives have sued the state alleging that they’re unable to track special education students and give them the support programs required under federal law. Some school districts have alleged that student counts were off or lagged in the state’s enrollment system, leaving the schools to absorb instruction costs or pass them along to families who had counted on free class time.

Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat, said families juggling the baseline chaos of childrearing and everyday life can’t afford problems with signups, lost resources and other barriers.

As for many families’ thwarted hopes for full-day classes, originally nearly 15,000 children had at least one risk factor that would have qualified them for 30 free hours of learning per week, according to Chalkbeat Colorado’s reporting.

After the state added income limits, fewer than 4,000 ended up qualifying.

“That one stings a lot,” Zenzinger said about families forced to shoulder unexpected costs if they wanted to make up the difference in hours. “But it’s one of those things where we can’t go back and undo it.”

Differing impact as Colorado’s standing rises fast

With a program so ambitious and so big, parents and schools across the state have felt the impact differently.

Some providers who saw expected enrollments fizzle worry it’ll put them out of business, while others trumpet that the universal preschool program helped them give teachers much-needed raises. Many families have found that it met their needs, easing some of the financial pressure of paying for child care and early education — while others, like Sargent-Knudson, are shouldering unexpected expenses or are in limbo, locked out of enrolling their child.

But the bare facts are impressive: More than 39,000 4-year-olds — or 60% of all who live in the state — have enrolled or been accepted to the program, as of last week. So have about 10,200 3-year-olds whose families met a low-income threshold or have another qualification.

In all, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood projects preschool and preschool special education enrollment rates to be 70% higher this year than they were last school year, when a state program provided only limited child care support for certain low-income families. In the course of two years, Colorado rocketed up the ranks of states with the most 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, from No. 26 in the 2021-22 school year to No. 8 now.

Helping fuel that jump was the more than 1,100 new preschool providers that signed up with the state, offering classroom spots, and parents looking to save an average of $6,000 per household, according to state data.

Betsy Nachand, the director of New Hope Preschool in Castle Rock, called the launch of free pre-school “huge.” She wasn’t able to increase the seats her school offers, but she said the program has provided stronger support for the school’s existing families and allowed her to raise her teachers’ salaries by $4 an hour, a priority amid an ongoing teacher shortage. Even in her well-off community, she said, a lot of parents were struggling to afford child care.

A year of extra school before kindergarten can pay dividends for students’ development, Nachand said — not just academically, but as people.

“That initial foundation they have in education is just really crucial,” Nachand said. “It’s not even so much the skills and the letters and the numbers and everything, it’s the socialization and the social-emotional skills that they’re learning.”

Polis and his staff frequently note the success in landing so many more children in preschool — and has pledged to further expand the base offering to at least 18 hours per child by the end of his second term, which ends in early 2027.

“The state has worked with the legislature and providers to get this voter-approved measure implemented for its first year and we look forward to continued progress in the coming years on free universal preschool,” Polis spokesman Conor Cahill said.

The state is still fighting a handful of lawsuits over the program. The Colorado Association of School Executives, the Consortium of Directors of Special Education, and several school districts allege in one that the program has interfered with their ability to properly accommodate children with special needs. Another, filed by the Denver Catholic Archdiocese and two of parishes, alleges the state is infringing on their First Amendment rights by not allowing them to exclude LGBTQ+ people or families if the schools participate in the universal preschool program.

This month, a federal judge ruled a Christian preschool in Buena Vista won’t be subject to the state’s nondiscrimination laws and policies while its separate lawsuit proceeds.

As those work their way through the courts, lawmakers say they are looking to separate which problems in the program’s rollout were one-time snags and which are potential ongoing problems the state needs to address. How Polis tailors his annual budget request, which is expected to be released this week, and any supplemental spending requests from the department will be heavily scrutinized.

Enough questions have swirled around the new program that a September meeting of the Joint Budget Committee, chaired by Zenzinger, couldn’t handle them all.

Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Brighton Republican, expressed her dismay that a program costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year couldn’t reliably tell parents who hoped to qualify for the 30-hour level how much preschool they should prepare for.

“Two weeks before this program starts, you pull the rug out from underneath parents and school districts and private providers and said ‘No,’ ” Kirkmeyer said.

The Department of Early Childhood’s executive director, Lisa Roy, on Thursday announced a proposed rule for next year that would qualify all families whose income is at or below the federal poverty line — about $30,000 a year for a family of four — for 30 hours a week of free class time, with no need for other qualifying risk factors. That should benefit some 3,000 children in the poorest families, closing a small part of the gap that existed this fall.

The state has moved to address other concerns raised by the program’s launch. Leaders at the 15-month-old department have also promised reforms that would help providers by smoothing out the complicated backend logistics of BridgeCare, the enrollment and tracking system that determines their payments.

After the initial boom of applications died down this year, the department also modified the registration system to allow families to enroll directly by walking into preschools — rather than requiring them to use the state’s website, as had been the case.

State’s unusual approach comes with trade-offs

Some of the problems appear rooted in how quickly the state scaled up its program, with few roadmaps to follow. Colorado is taking a unique approach to universal preschool, said Cynthia Osborne, executive director of the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University.

Other states have worked on targeting various populations, such as low-income or military families or children with developmental needs. Only Colorado has pursued across-the-board access, said Osborne, a professor of early childhood education and policy.

She’s hopeful it will produce good outcomes for the children’s development and help families of different backgrounds and needs. A key question, Osborne said, is how many will use it as a launching point for full-day preschool — whether that’s fully paid for by the state or something they have to chip in for — and how many simply rely on the standard 15 hours provided.

“We know that if we can have kids in higher-quality pre-kindergarten services, that can actually be a really important benefit to prepare these kids for kindergarten and beyond,” Osborne said. “But it does have to be high-quality, and it has to be accessible to the families that need it the most.

“There’s always a trade-off when you make something universal so that everyone gets a little bit of something — versus when it’s very targeted to make sure it meets those with the biggest needs.”

Sargent-Knudson and their partner thought Rune was part of the high-need group, given her speech difficulties, which qualified her for an individualized education program under federal law. IEPs also are standard as schools decide how to address special-education students’ needs.

As the family looked ahead to fall enrollment, Sargent-Knudson, who uses they/them pronouns, relied on state guidance. Early in the year, the state said 4-year-olds likely would qualify for 30 hours a week under the new program if they were deemed at-risk in one of several ways: they merited an IEP, they were in families with a low income or experiencing homelessness, they were dual-language learners or they were in foster care.

The family picked up on rumblings in the spring that the state might not have enough money to guarantee 30 hours for all those groups, something they’d taken as a promise. But though Sargent-Knudson’s nonprofit work involves education and their partner works in teaching, they heard nothing certain about firm changes from state and local officials throughout the summer — until late July, just before the school year’s start.

That is when the state added a second qualification: Anyone within the eligible groups must also be a member of a household with an income below 270% of the federal poverty guideline. That is about $75,000 for a family of four, or about $62,000 for a family of three, in Sargent-Knudson’s case — and their income was higher, meaning they no longer qualified for full-day preschool.

The couple also made too much to qualify for additional programs, such as Head Start and the Child Care Assistance Program, that the state recommended families look to for help.

The shifting ground gave them emotional vertigo.

Sargent-Knudson suggested the new state program “strung us along — they strung families along and they strung the districts along all summer long.”

Ian McKenzie, the spokesperson for the Department of Early Childhood, said officials had tried to warn parents like Sargent-Knudson and their partner that the 30 hours of class time was only a possibility. In hindsight, he said, it could have emphasized the uncertainty better.

State law said the department must prioritize low-income families, and enrollment numbers didn’t become clear until mid-summer — compounding the communication snarl and limiting how much advance notice the state could give.

“The 30 hours were dependent on funding, and we had that in the application system for parents, we were clear about that with providers, but timing was an issue,” Roy, the department’s director, told lawmakers last month. “We were trying to stand up a new department, stand up a new initiative, and at the same time being very responsive.”

Rachel Tabone, a single mom in Weld County, has experienced a different problem qualifying for the 30-hour level. She said she should meet the income limits, and her youngest son is on an individualized education program for speech development. But his birthday falls after their school district’s cut-off for kindergarten; since he’s 5 years old, the state’s system didn’t show him as eligible, she said.

So far, her provider is “being awesome” by providing the full 30 hours of learning without charge, but Tabone still worries that she’ll somehow get stuck with a bill she can’t afford.

“My first two years of preschool for him were through a speech therapist with his IEP,” she said. “Everything went so smoothly. I didn’t have one issue. So I expected the same thing. And instead, it’s one thing after another.”

Many families satisfied, but some private providers feel strain

Gauging families’ experiences at large is difficult. The Early Childhood Education Association of Colorado, an advocate for private preschool providers, conducted an informal online study that, while not scientific, has fielded mostly positive responses.

Of 134 respondents, 76% said the universal preschool program is what they expected from Proposition EE, the 2020 ballot measure that raised tobacco and nicotine taxes for universal preschool. A similar number said they received the hours they expected. And more than 90% reported that with their match, they got “exactly what we wanted for our child.”

Dawn Alexander, the executive director of the association, noted that survey’s binary options didn’t allow an option for families satisfied with their school match, but wishing they had other choices, among other mixed opinions. But she said many respondents indicated they’d prefer a different process for finding matches in the future than preferential ranking, for example.

“They’re calling it parent choice, which is just absurd,” Alexander said of the state program. “If they want to keep the matching process that’s fine, but they need to allow for one choice to be entered and (for) parents to choose the program they want in that process.”

Among private and nonprofit providers, the impact of universal preschool has been wide-ranging, producing hiccups for some.

D’Arla Mezzacapo, who runs Take-A-Break in Lafayette, said her impression has been that the state’s system has prioritized public schools for matches. She said she held open 50 slots at her school specifically for universal preschool students, under the prior guidance that the state would pay per slot, not per student.

When many of those students didn’t show up, she said her program started losing $40,000 a month.

The school’s mission focuses on children’s general social development as much as traditional learning, Mezzacapo said, lamenting the disruption that’s come this year.

“The factors that used to exist, where each school had their program and students could be matched into their best services, that doesn’t exist anymore,” she said.

Mezzacapo faces the possibility of having to lay off staff if the state’s portal doesn’t begin directing parents her way.

Melissa Lelm, who runs Early Childhood University in Greeley, was more pointed in an interview.

“I hope to survive this year,” Lelm said of her 21-year-old program.

Lelm doesn’t offer child care and describes her program as pure preschool. She said she requested nearly 200 spots under universal preschool. But she’s getting matched with one student a week, and often seeing repeat matches.

It’s led her to lay off four staff members, she said. Just one of five classrooms is open. And now she faces a new conundrum: Another full classroom of new students would set her up to keep going, but that would come with the challenge of hiring a new teacher.

The new state program is “hurting businesses that have been in early childhood for a very, very long time,” Lelm said. “We’re talking about the small start-up, mom-n-pop-style child care centers that are suffering and hoping to make it. I was definitely nervous back in January when they were going to roll it out. That nervousness is gone now, but only because there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s what it’s going to be — I only wish it was different.”