Seventh-grade sports teams, education technician jobs and several maintenance projects fell victim to cuts in next year's budget for Regional School Unit 38.  But even while trying to minimize the tax increase for district residents, the school board found one area where they wanted to add, not eliminate: pre-kindergarten.

[State Sen. Peggy Lehner] said 5,700 students are currently in public preschool; Gov. John Kasich has proposed raising that to 6,200. An additional 30,000 are in Head Start programs that Lehner said vary greatly in quality. But 130,000 more are eligible because they are in households making less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

Proposals to tie public funding to student performance and issue letter grades to Louisiana’s public and private early childhood education programs are finding easy passage through the Legislature.

Two new studies on a state funded pre-K program show Arkansas is beginning to shrink the gap between low-income children and other children.  The Rutgers University study found Arkansas Better Chance students had improved scores in vocabulary and math through the second grade and in literacy through the third grade than students who did not attend ABC.

Children who participate in these programs are more likely to graduate from high school, hold a job considered semi-skilled or higher, attain a four-year degree and earn more as adults. And that is good for our businesses and our state’s economy.  Key to these economic outcomes are two critical factors: the quality of the programs and access to the programs.

Florida’s VPK program would be much more effective if funding was doubled, the school day was longer and teachers were required to have four-year degrees, said Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at New Jersey’s Rutgers University.

Like much of the nation, Ohio has slashed enrollment and funding in public preschool for children in low-income families, according to a report released yesterday.  State aid for preschool dropped by more than a half-billion dollars in the 2011-12 school year, the largest one-year drop ever, according to a study by the National Institute for Early Education Research, which has tracked state pre-kindergarten programs since 2002.

State funding for preschool across the country dropped last school year after a decade of growth, tapping the brakes on the quality and reach of programs as President Obama has called for a massive expansion of early childhood education, according to a national survey scheduled for release Monday.

Gov. Susana Martinez says the state education department will be able to expand pre-kindergarten education next year and fund all 40 programs across the state that applied for funding.  Martinez says that thanks to a $4.5 million increase in the budget approved by lawmakers for the 2013-2014 school year, the education department can fund 12 new PreK programs in areas including Roswell, Silver City and Taos.