Pre-K’s Big Question: Where Will We Put the Kids?

As State-Funded Pre-K Grows, Finding Enough Space Is One Challenge. Having the Right Space in the Right Place Is Another.

The expansion in public preschool education continues apace. Before the ink is dry on the enabling legislation, however, there are those who must ponder the facilities questions. Does the physical space exist to accommodate the swelling ranks of children? If so, does it provide enriching learning environments? Equally important, is it suitably located? If not who will provide it and how?

Supported by research showing benefits for children and economic returns to society from an "invest early" strategy, political and business leaders are driving the movement to improve and expand preschool programs. "As more states fund preschool education, ensuring an adequate supply of quality preschool facilities promises to become an increasingly critical public policy function," says Carl Sussman, who heads Sussman Associates, a Massachusetts-based community development consulting practice.

Sussman and other experts say ensuring the supply of facilities meets the growing demand for them is no easy task. Many neighborhoods, particularly in built-up urban areas, have a limited supply of existing facilities that meet state standards for providing high-quality early childhood education and limited land area for new construction.

That proved true when California studied distribution of pre-K facilities and also when New Jersey began providing court-mandated, state-funded pre-K to needy school districts for the Abbott Preschool Program. Kathleen Priestley, a veteran Abbott Program early childhood supervisor in Orange, New Jersey, recalls, "Eight years ago, we were placing children in child care centers that met minimal licensing requirements, and still seriously under-serving the preschool population." To begin the first Orange in-district classrooms, Priestley and her colleagues obtained temporary classroom units and rented space in a parochial school--not an ideal situation but one that enabled children to benefit from the Abbott program.

Priestley says some preschool providers have since been able to renovate and/or build to pre-K specifications. "In those cases we see the difference first hand. Our teaching practices and program quality are improving each year," she says. Priestley is looking forward to a new district preschool center and finding ways to rehab other provider classrooms so all the children are in equally healthy learning environments. In general she says the facilities situation has improved significantly across the state since the first days of the program.

Sussman says comprehensive public policies are sorely needed to ensure an adequate supply of facilities and that "It's equally important to recognize that specially designed facilities can provide learning environments that support child development and program quality." Sussman, along with Amy Gillman, senior program director of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), developed an in-depth report and policy brief, Building Early Childhood Facilities: What States Can Do to Create Supply and Promote Quality, a joint NIEER – LISC publication.

"State early childhood facilities development policies need to address financial barriers, design and real estate development practices, and policy and regulatory issues," Sussman says. "The most obvious policy challenge is to bridge the gap between the cost of quality facilities and the tough financial realities of delivering early care and education."

As he and Gillman point out in the policy report, states can assist programs in obtaining the necessary capital through a number of means: subsidizing debt, debt-service support, rate enhancements and other creative approaches. The new report comprehensively details the numerous subsidization and lending strategies.

Another early childhood facilities expert, Jim Greenman, agrees there's a need to look at facilities from a policy perspective. He believes the expansion of state-funded pre-K may be providing the impetus to re-examine what it takes to develop good learning environments for young children. Greenman heads program development at Bright Horizons, a company that develops early care and education centers for corporations and other organizations. He also wrote the book Caring Spaces, Learning Places: Children's Environments That Work.

"We're now in an age of purpose-built facilities where children can be for six to nine hours a day and learn in ways appropriate to their ages. Properly designed, they accommodate staff and parent needs as well as enable kids to learn creatively," he says.

Greenman ticks off a list of features like indoor large motor space for kids to play in, learning centers where children gather for educational activities, conferencing space for meetings with parents, which translate to program quality one way or another.

More Space, More Quality
Research in recent years has established that it takes more space per child than previously thought to engage children as active learners. According to the Community Investment Collaborative for Kids (CICK) Resource Guide, research shows it takes between 45 and 54 square feet of activity space per child.

That's higher than the 35 square feet per child minimum many states require for licensing child care centers. While the state standards for floor space are intended to make sure children aren't packed in like sardines, they can also represent a stumbling block in developing new facilities for pre-K.

"If minimums like 35 square feet per child of classroom space become the guide for planning new environments, the floor in essence becomes your ceiling and it limits your ability to provide features like large indoor motor space and ample learning centers," Greenman says. In Greenman's experience, those spaces rarely fit in plans averaging less than 45 square feet per child. Once other features like hallways, offices, bathrooms and meeting rooms are figured in, it isn't unusual for the overall floor space calculations for an entire facility to exceed 100 square feet per child served. CICK's resource guide recommends multiplying the number of children served by 100 as a rule of thumb for total square feet needed in new center construction.

Comprehensive Facilities
In order to create comprehensive facilities development policies, says Sussman, states need to address the full array of impediments, including financial barriers, real estate development practices, and policy and regulatory issues. He says it's not enough for state facilities policies to help construct isolated projects. The objective is to create a reliable system that enables the early education field to meet its physical and capital needs. "Otherwise," he says, "the benefits of early education--academic achievement and long-term savings in remedial programs to name just two--will not be fully realized."

Sidebar

Building Early Childhood Facilities: What States Can Do to Create Supply and Promote Quality
A joint publication of NIEER and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation addresses early childhood facilities from the quality, policy, development, and finance perspectives. Authored by community development consultant Carl Sussman and Community Investment Collaborative for Kids (CICK) founder Amy Gillman, the report and companion policy brief discuss why facilities relate to children's learning and program quality and explore various policies that can help bridge the gap between the cost of quality facilities and the financial realities of delivering early care and education. The authors explain numerous subsidization and lending strategies, pointing out features of policies in leading states that may be of value elsewhere. Sussman and Gillman also discuss the pros and cons of school and community settings, sound practices in design and development, and propose a number of best practices. Read the policy brief at http:// nieer.org/docs/index.php?DocID=172 and the full report at http://nieer.org/docs/index.php?DocID=168.