Texas invested big in pre-K. Now a tight state budget could threaten that funding.

After a massive expansion of pre-K across Texas, the future of early education funding could be at risk because of the pandemic-induced financial crisis.

Lawmakers face a tough 2021 legislative session with necessary budget cuts likely. School districts that benefited from the early education investment hope elected officials will protect that funding.

Carrollton-Farmers Branch schools, for example, received $4.5 million to grow their prekindergarten offerings from half- to full-day because of the historic 2019 school finance package that bolstered funding for early childhood education.

The district was one of about 460 districts and public charter schools across the state that expanded access to pre-K classes for Texas’ youngest students in the two years since House Bill 3 passed, according to Early Matters Dallas. Early Matters Dallas is associated with the Commit Partnership, a funder of The Dallas Morning News’ Education Lab.

The landmark public education bill gave an unexpected windfall to Texas school districts, investing $6.5 billion in new funding. One of the hallmarks of the bill was additional money for pre-K and a mandate that all districts offer full-day classes for eligible 4-year-olds.

Susan Hoff has watched the legislative process unfold for the last 2 1/2 decades and in her 14 legislative sessions advocating for early childhood education, she rarely saw such progress.

“There are days where I still can’t even believe it happened,” said Hoff, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas’ chief strategy and impact officer.

In the 2018-19 school year, 497 campuses offered full-day pre-K. Next school year, that number is expected to increase to 972 if funding levels remain the same.

But a new legislative session is less than a month away and the effects of the pandemic’s financial crisis are looming. Lawmakers will have to slash budgets to overcome a still unknown deficit and in the past, pre-K has been a target.

Early education advocates hope that the progress made in the 2019 session won’t be undone as research repeatedly shows that the more access kids have to pre-K, the better they perform academically long term.

“This is truly one of those cases where more is better,” said Derek Little, Dallas ISD’s deputy chief academic officer. “Full-day is better than half-day and two years is better than one year.”

Financial constraints

Less than a month before the start of the 2021 legislative session, elected officials still don’t know how much money they’ll have to cut and where the cuts will come from.

Comptroller Glenn Hegar said this summer that Texas’ nearly $3 billion surplus had been replaced with a $4.6 billion deficit.

In November, he projected that the 2019-20 budget’s shortfall should be more manageable. But Hegar made no mention of what deficit legislators would have to work with in the coming legislative session. That number won’t be announced until January on the day before lawmakers officially convene.

The last time Texas faced such a significant funding shortfall was in 2011. That session brought more than $5 billion in cuts to public education, including $200 million in grants pre-K. Texas schools didn’t see funding levels fully restored until 2020, education officials said. .

In the sessions following the 2011 education cuts, pre-K resurfaced again and again as a priority among education advocates. Lawmakers awarded the issue some funding, but not widespread financial support.

In 2015, Gov. Greg Abbott named pre-K one of his five emergency items and legislators passed a bill that set aside $130 million for quality pre-K programs. Two years later, Abbott again named pre-K a priority, but lawmakers made no significant progress on the issue.

House Bill 3 provisions

There were signs of support for greater public education funding on the first day of the 2019 legislative session when House members sipped from cups that read “School finance reform: the time is now.”

Conversations with lawmakers started changing. Elected officials — some of whom had once described public pre-K as steps away from socialism — started to speak animatedly about the importance of early childhood education.

The school finance overhaul, which is largely based on student attendance, gave districts more money for teaching those who need the most help. For example, schools received an additional $600 for each student who came from a low-income family or was learning English and $1,200 for students who qualified as both, said Bob Popinski, the director of policy for Raise Your Hand Texas.

School districts were supposed to use this money to expand their pre-K offerings and retrain all kindergarten through third-grade teachers in the science of reading. The goal of the funding was to better prepare students in their earliest years of school.

Some districts, such as Dallas ISD, were already offering full-day pre-K for 4-year-olds in 2019. The influx of early education dollars allowed those school systems to invest in new programs for other students.

DISD used its $30 million in new funding to implement state-mandated reading academies that taught teachers about the science of reading and bolstered middle school programming. Should early education funding get cut, school districts would probably have to scale back elsewhere.

Questions about future funding

Should pre-K fall victim to lawmakers’ budget cuts, school districts may not be able to maintain their expansion plans.

“We have many more children to serve in the state, both at the 3- and 4-year-old level,” Little said. “So not only would they get less dosage, which the research shows matters, but they would have less opportunity to participate at all, which is absolutely detrimental to the future of Texas.”

Cuts are a possibility, especially since showing a significant return on investment might be difficult. Academic outcomes since the funding increase may not show promising data because the pandemic was so disruptive.

Pre-K enrollment has also been down throughout Texas and the country during the pandemic. About 40% of the enrollment loss in the state’s public schools comes from kindergarten and pre-K.

Lawmakers could take these two factors as evidence that maintaining funding doesn’t matter for early education.

Republican Morgan Meyer, who sits on the House Public Education Committee, doesn’t see it that way. He was part of the group that helped shape House Bill 3 and hopes that lawmakers will be able to protect the funding.

“We have to make funding public education a priority,” Meyer said. “We have to continue that commitment, and we have to make that a priority this next session, regardless of the budget shortfalls.”

In his conversations with colleagues, Meyer hasn’t heard anyone talking about cutting public education, which makes up about 40% of the state’s general revenue budget. In fact, the Dallas Republican feels there may be need to expand in some areas like student internet access.

Even a pause in funding could disrupt progress for students currently in school, Hoff said, noting that such pauses often mean money won’t be available back later on.

And the investment is needed now, she emphasized.

“Pre-K is not a vaccination or an immunization against all challenges, but it builds a foundation that is critically important,” Hoff said. “The need is going to be even greater after this pandemic.”

The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, The Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.