The economy is slowly improving, but across the country state budgets are shrinking, and early education could lose some ground.
In Georgia and Iowa, for example, the governors’ proposed budgets would eliminate voluntary preschool programs and the Texas legislative budget would kill off a pre-kindergarten system for 100,000 mostly at-risk children, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reports this week. Here in Washington State legislators are weighing early education cuts.
Here are details of suggested preschool and pre-k cuts from the report:
- “Governor Deal of Georgia proposes to cut state and lottery funds for pre-kindergarten by 5.6 percent. This would require eliminating 4,500 pre-K slots, reducing payments to providers by nearly $230 per child, or a mix of cutting slots and reducing payments.”
- “Governor Branstad of Iowa eliminates the state’s voluntary preschool program, replacing it with a means-tested voucher program, and halves other state funds that help children access preschool. As a result, state support for preschool will decline by 41 percent.”
- “Texas’s initial budget, produced by state’s Legislative Budget Board (the Governor is not required to produce an initial budget in Texas), would eliminate funding for pre-K programs that serve almost 100,000 mostly at-risk children — over 40 percent of the state’s pre-kindergarten students.” (Bold from the original. See report for footnotes.) –Governors are Proposing Further Deep Cuts in Services, Likely Harming Their Economies. Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. 2/7/11.
Not all states have proposed budgets, but 22 of the 31 budgets released so far would make big cuts in public services, according to the Washington-based think tank’s analysis, which says these deep cuts would not help the economy bounce back.
“These actions, coming on top of deep cuts that states have already made over the last three years, would place a drag on the nation’s economic recovery.”
(Thanks to the Washington Post’s Wonkbook blog for highlighting the report.)