Testimony to NJ State Board of Education on New Jersey’s Public Preschool System

TO:        Members of the New Jersey State Board of Education

FROM:  Cindy Shields, Senior Policy Analyst for Early Care & Education

             Advocates for Children of New Jersey

DATE:  September 4, 2024

RE:       New Jersey’s Public Preschool System

Advocates for Children of New Jersey (ACNJ) appreciates the opportunity to provide comments on New Jersey’s public education system as it relates to the well-being and success of our youngest residents. ACNJ is committed to ensuring that all children have access to high-quality education in safe and enriching environments as their fundamental right. We aim to ensure that systems serving children uphold standards that support healthy development and provide pathways to academic, economic, and social success.

New Jersey has been a national model of Preschool education for decades, and has since strengthened and built the program to include over 200 school districts in the state. Some of the most robust programs include a mixed delivery model that includes private providers as well as public schools as the educational home for 3- and 4-year-olds. Mixed delivery is a national best practice and has numerous advantages, parental choice and family circumstances as a deciding factor in a child’s education being the most important.

A true mixed delivery system has numerous benefits, some of which are:

• Private child care providers have extensive experience providing early care and education services in their respective communities. Communities that they are often deeply rooted in and well respected by;
• Private child care centers can effectively address the needs of working parents who may need full-day, full-year services for their children. Providing preschool in child care centers can be more convenient for parents and less disruptive for children, because they do not have to be moved from one location to another each day and during the summer. If a parent also has an infant or toddler, private centers may also provide care in the same facility, thereby strengthening the family unit and offering even more supports to the family as a whole;
• Utilizing space in existing child care centers can facilitate the rapid expansion of classrooms and will also reduce tax-payer investment by eliminating the need to expend funds for renovation of current classrooms or the construction of additional rooms in public school buildings;
• Successful involvement of child care centers in preschool initiatives aligns preschool programs within a birth-through-third-grade continuum of services and creates sustainable programs by coordinating existing early learning funds. It also promotes collaboration among schools, child care providers, other early care and education programs and parents, enabling them all to take advantage of the expertise each partner brings and to make effective use of early childhood resources. Such collaboration can lead to joint efforts not only on preschool expansion but also on the full array of supports and services that children and their families require;
• Avoids the serious, negative financial impact on child care of centers of losing three & four year olds, which threatens the availability and quality of local early care and education for children from birth through age 3. We have already seen the system (as it stands) create “Infant Toddler Care deserts”, areas in which there is not sufficient licensed child care to meet the needs of the community. This leads to children being in unregulated, possibly hazardous and inconsistent, care, as well as, inhibiting the parents’ ability to fully and reliably participate in the workforce. Early care and education programs are the backbone of our economy, the workforce behind the workforce, supporting many industries, including the PK-12 system in NJ. Without it, the economy suffers, along with the child and their family.

I often speak with providers in Abbott and Expansion districts across the state, in my role at ACNJ as well as sitting President of the New Jersey Association for the Education of Young Children (NJAEYC).  As Preschool Expansion in New Jersey has grown, expanded, and evolved, we have seen several barriers to the successful implementation of mixed delivery appear. In Abbott Districts, enrollment in private providers and Head Start programs decreased by 25% from fall 2009 to fall 2022, dropping from 25,121 to 18,704 students. In the fall 2010, 51% of Abbott preschoolers were enrolled in private providers or Head Start programs; by 2022, this had declined to only 38%. In Preschool Expansion Districts, in fall 2022, of the nearly 20,000 preschool students in districts funded through Preschool Expansion, only 3,300 (or 17%) were enrolled in private providers or Head Start programs. Some barriers that are leading to this include:

• Square footage requirements exceed what our child care infrastructure was built on. Department of Children and Families, Office of Licensing regulations mandate a minimum of 35 square feet per child, or a minimum classroom size of 525 square feet for 15 children.  950 square feet is a stretch, even the minimum, with a waiver, of 700 square feet puts many classrooms out of reach of districts as possible classroom space. As a side note, NJ is only one of two states that does not use their licensing requirement for square footage as a basis for classroom size for state-funded preschool;
• Educational requirements often exceed those of teaching staff in private child care centers. We recognize the importance of teacher preparation and certification and suggest a pathway and time frame to achieve the proper degree and certification required for preschool teachers in NJ. This was applied successfully in the early days of Abbott implementation, as well as in other states. Knowing that we are in a crisis-level teacher shortage, we need to implement multiple strategies to close the gap and preserve the integrity of our educational system;
• Even with the “due diligence” language in PEA funding application requirements, there seems to be an unwillingness on the part of some school districts to collaborate with private providers. While there are many success stories (Sayreville, Passaic, Paterson and many more), we hear from Providers weekly that have tried repeatedly to connect with representatives from their local school district only to be ignored, or worse, told that it is only a matter of time before they go out of business because the district will be educating all of the 3- and 4-year olds in the district. I’m sure that this is not in the spirit of collaboration that this Board intended.

The rapid and necessary expansion of preschool programming for younger learners has laid bare some unintended, unfortunate consequences that can no longer continue unchecked, or it will further fracture the system. We must remind ourselves that preschool can be a child and family’s first interaction with the public school system. We must work to create collaborative partnerships between school districts and private providers to educate our children and serve the families they come from. If the relationship starts off positively, it will end with a proud graduate and successful citizen.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Should you have any questions or need additional information, please feel free to reach me at cshields@acnj.org.