Pre-School Promise: Funding plan to change, eligibility to shrink

CINCINNATI (WKRC) - The hope was to make pre-school available to 5,000 more children in the city of Cincinnati.

A group called "Pre-School Promise" wanted Cincinnati to be the first major city in America to have taxpayer-supported pre-school for both three and 4-year-olds. Town hall meetings and listening sessions were held in different neighborhoods to drum up support for the program. Pre-School Promise even traveled to Denver to research funding of a similar program there.

But it looks like the $16-$18 million price tag is too high and competition with another tax increase potentially too damaging. So, the Pre-School Promise is being scaled back.

Pre-School Promise wanted universal pre-school with tuition subsidies for parents. Any parent would be eligible, not just the poor, and subsidy size would be based on family income. Pre-School Promise was aiming for a Cincinnati earnings tax increase on the November ballot to pay for the plan. But after a meeting Tuesday Ma7 17, between Pre-School Promise leaders and school board members, the earnings tax idea was dead and preschool eligibility will be different too

While details were being finalized, pre-school for all 3-year-olds was out with subsidies for a much smaller number of those children.

Pre-School Promise Director Greg Landsman said, "We have to provide two years of high quality pre-school for all of our children, even if we have to start with those children who absolutely need it the most and whose parents couldn't otherwise afford it."

Funding for Pre-School Promise will be reduced and folded in to a Cincinnati Public School system property tax levy in November, rather than being a stand-alone issue. The political reality driving the issue was fear. If there were two separate tax issues on the ballot, one Pre-School Promise and one for Cincinnati Public Schools, both would go down.

School board finance chair Eve Bolton said, "It's going to be hard enough to get the kind of levy passed that we're going to need, with all of the pressures that exist for taxpayers now. We think that would spell doom for sure."

They are still talking about a major expansion of pre-school; making all 4-year-olds eligible for subsidies seems intact as was the idea of letting parents use those subsidies at private providers. The full school board meets Monday night, May 23, and the final plan, still a work in progress, should be hammered out by then.

The size of the November school levy, including pre-school, was still on the drawing board. The Cincinnati school system has not had a new operating levy in eight years.