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NEW BEDFORD — The giggling, toddling crowd of preschoolers don’t even wave goodbye as they rush into the Parker Early Childhood Center. With so much learning and play to look forward to, they seem more than happy to leave parents and caregivers in the dust.
“He just goes off and is like, ‘Bye!’” said Shevonne Arias, whose 4-year-old son just disappeared into the building.
But the adults are receiving a rare gift that might soften the sting of little ones leaving the nest so gleefully: free early education.
Private pre-K and daycare providers in Massachusetts are more expensive than any state in the country — only Washington, D.C. is more expensive. And Massachusetts ranks 43rd among all U.S. states in how much it spends on public preschool options, falling behind much of the rest of the country, according to a new study.
Despite the long-lasting benefits of attending pre-K, it’s not easy for parents to find seats. As the cost of pre-K options has crept up to more than $17,000 per year for 4-year olds — more expensive than in-state tuition at UMass Dartmouth — Massachusetts’ state-funded preschools have actually experienced a slight decline in enrollment. They have also earned lower-than-average marks for quality, according to a study from the National Institute of Early Education Research.
In other states, preschoolers are enrolling in state-funded programs in record numbers, including a universal, high-quality option in Georgia and historic enrollment gains in California. Part of the enrollment slide in Massachusetts likely has to do with overall population decline and fewer people having children.
So while the picture around the country is higher enrollment and growing funding for state-funded pre-K, Massachusetts has become one of the “states that fell behind.”
In New Bedford, the last few years have brought a renewed local focus on providing high-quality and affordable early education. The Parker building is a monument to the effort: the building was converted from an elementary school to a “one-stop shop,” where students come for evaluations, enrollment, daily classes, and before- and after-school care, all under one roof.
But despite New Bedford’s targeted local investment, the pre-K enrollment here has fallen, too.
At least part of the decline has to do with a new full-time schedule. “Shifting from half-day to full-day programs has definitely limited some of our spots,” said Dina Machado, an administrator who focuses on special education.
Yet even as pre-K enrollment contracts, New Bedford and districts around the state are seeing a rapid increase in the number of pre-K special education students, including those with diagnosed autism spectrum disorders.
Machado said she’s seen a more than three-fold increase in the number of pre-K students with diagnosed autism disorders in just the last five years — from about 40 students in 2021 to about 140 today, based on her estimates.
“We’re seeing a lot of kids need instruction in how to play and how to socialize,” she said. “We’ve made a huge shift in adapting to the population of students that we have.”
Although they instruct more students with disabilities in each pre-K classroom, districts receive significantly less funding for these students than they do for their K-12 counterparts. (And that amount is also less than most other states.)
What’s needed: ‘If we had more funding I would…’
The need for affordable, robust education in the early years is well-documented. These programs offer long-term academic benefits to children, they allow parents to re-enter the workforce during an affordability crisis, and they help new arrivals to learn English.
But one thing helps explain why you might be hearing more about it recently: “Kindergarten is a lot different than it was in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s… when a lot of our parents went to school,” explained Ellyn Gallant-Bland, principal at the Parker Early Childhood Center.
In kindergarten, kids “need to sit and listen and be a good friend and have that numeracy ready [for math standards] and that phonemic awareness [for reading standards],” said Gallant-Bland. There’s less time to learn how to socialize, share, hold up a book, or regulate your emotions when you get upset — skills that are more and more being pushed down to the pre-K level.
Yet unlike traditional K-12, it’s not part of a public school’s mission to offer pre-K to every child.
Massachusetts requires districts to offer pre-K to children with special learning needs. But public school pre-K receives $2,662 in state funding per child, or about one-fourth the average state aid a K-12 student receives through the same formula
Massachusetts has modestly increased its investments in a “mixed-delivery model,” where grants support private providers while public districts offer other targeted services.
Still, overall state support for early education lags behind most of the rest of the country. Local educators have seen the benefits of these programs, and hope for more investment.
“I think it’s detrimental for the kids,” said Christine Robertson, an early childhood manager in New Bedford. “Realistically, if they would fund it like they did K-12 education, we could have more classrooms.”
Typically, 100 students are put on a pre-K waitlist each year, Robertson said. These families must find alternatives in the expensive Massachusetts marketplace.
Machado, the administrator focused on special education, said she would use more funding to increase the number of speech and occupational therapists. “There would be so many benefits to having these [specialists] present for all students developing literacy and language skills.”
Gallant-Bland, the principal at the Parker Early Childhood Center, said she would use more funding for books and curriculum. She wants to help her students become “good little human beings,” she said, including, “to know how to be a good friend, to know how to have empathy, know how to share, and to be ready for academic rigor.”
Superintendent O’Leary wants clarity
Massachusetts operates a complicated system and that presents challenges. Besides the funding stream for public districts, there are state grants for private pre-K providers (which are managed locally by districts), and separate stabilization grants for private providers (which are issued by the state).
Andrew O’Leary, superintendent of New Bedford Public Schools, said that this complexity gets in the way.
“Part of the challenge is how we talk about early education,” he said. “The mission of a K-12 system is formal, inclusive schooling. That’s not necessarily the mission for service providers for infants, toddlers and others.”
O’Leary said that reform could mean creating a new or reinvigorated public entity that manages early education. Just as public K-12 and higher education receive different streams of funding and operate through different agencies, early education could benefit from “more dedicated, standalone, and separate education funding,” O’Leary said.
Public officials, from Mayor Jon Mitchell to Gov. Maura Healey, have been talking about the need for more affordable early education. That’s part of why early educators in New Bedford are hopeful about the future.
“I’m really happy with the direction that New Bedford’s taking,” said Gallant-Bland, the principal at Parker.
And until things change, this principal’s mission stays the same: “We’re growing them from the ground up, one Whaler at a time.”
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
