young girl working on puzzle

A daughter puts together a jumbo-sized puzzle in her half-day state preschool plan in East Palo Alto at the Artistic Montessori Learning Eye in March. Country preschool does not have enough funding for all qualified students. The governor's proposed May budget revision won't change that. Credit: Lillian Mongeau, EdSource Today

Early education advocates in California were hoping for increases in preschool and child care funding in the governor's revised budget, released Tuesday. No such luck.

"The governor talks a lot most educational disinterestedness and equality of opportunity," said Scott Moore, policy analyst for the early education advancement grouping Early Edge California. "He is really missing the boat when information technology comes to preschool."

The funding change that is most likely to affect a child under 5 next yr is the proposed decrease to funding for a child care plan known as CalWorks 3. This program for the children of the working poor is meant to help parents keep their jobs past providing child care for young children and after-schoolhouse care for children up to age 12. That programme would operate on $iv.4 meg less next yr than it is in the current twelvemonth if the governor's revised budget is adopted, according to Rachel Ehlers at the Legislative Analyst's Part.

Funding for country preschool, a plan for children from families making under 200 percent of the poverty level – $47,100 a twelvemonth for a family of four – stayed nearly flat under the governor's proposal. And so too did funding for general subsidized child care. Instead of the small, nearly negligible, decreases independent in the governor's Jan budget proposal, the May revision contains modest, most negligible increases. The changes are the upshot of a new guess of the number of children under age 5 who are expected to live in the state in the next financial twelvemonth.

Ehlers warned at that place may be more than to come up. Cuts to child care and preschool due to federal sequestration do non announced to be reflected in the May revision, she said.

"Sequestration will result in additional reductions to some child care program" or programs, Ehlers said. The question, she said, is how and where the cut volition exist applied across the state's several kid care and education programs.

Governor Jerry Dark-brown did not mention early childhood teaching in his remarks Tuesday well-nigh the release of the revised budget, choosing instead to focus on his Local Control Funding Formula for One thousand-12 education. The formula is meant to provide additional funding to schools with a significant number of students living in poverty, learning English and participating in foster intendance. That priority is on target, said Assemblymember Joan Buchanan, who chairs the Associates Commission on Education.

"Simply if we're non doing more to help them come to school set to learn, we're not maximizing the bear upon of what we're doing to help them in K-12," said Buchanan, D-Alamo.

The one bright spot in the early care and teaching funding landscape is a complicated bit of budgeting that ways that First 5 California will concord on to $25 million of its own money rather than turning it over to the Department of Developmental Services. Kickoff 5, a state commission supported past a voter-approved cigarette tax, funds programs across the land focused on improving health and education for children under historic period 5. The commission has previously complied with many requests to plow over portions of its protected funding stream to the state departments facing cuts.

This spring, the Department of Developmental Services asked Kickoff v for $40 million to cover costs for a program for infants and 1-twelvemonth-olds. First 5 agreed to give the department $fifteen millionorthward of its most $90 meg upkeep. The May revision provides for the $25 meg to become to the Department of Developmental Services directly from the state in lieu of coming from Beginning 5 equally previously requested.

"We're obviously happy to aid our partners and anything that's going to improve the wellness of children," age 5 and younger, said Lindsay VanLaningham, spokesperson for First 5 California. "But now, we get to continue funding our programs and priorities hither."

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