State-funded preschool in Rhode Island is a maze. But one engineered with a purpose.

Vanida Phrathep is shown with her daughter Scarlette at a family event at Beautiful Beginnings in Providence in April 2024. (Courtesy of Vanida Phrathep)

The poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, “To wait an hour/is long.”

How about two months? That’s how long Vanida Phrathep, a Providence mother of three, sat on proverbial pins and needles, wondering if her then 4-year-old son Noah would get into state-funded pre-K.

“It’s the waiting that was really anxiety-provoking,” Phrathep said in a recent phone interview.

Her angst was due in part to the state’s method of assigning free seats for its pre-K program: A randomized lottery.

The word “lottery” implies something like a scratch ticket, whose foiled surface favors no one in particular. But since its debut 15 years ago, the RI Pre-K lottery has been not so much a gamble as it is a system engineered to educate the state’s youngest in economically and socially diverse environments.

When parents apply for state-funded pre-K, the application states the “lottery is not income dependent.” But how students are chosen is not left entirely to chance. Add in the fact that state-funded pre-K is not the only way to educate your 4-year-old, and you begin to see the densely layered landscape that is early childhood education in Rhode Island.

“There’s many, many people who are confused,” said Leanne Barrett, policy analyst at Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, which helped fund the research and design behind the pre-K program.

Even lawmakers have trouble understanding it.

“There are some families that do have the income to potentially go somewhere else,” Sen. Lou DiPalma, a Middletown Democrat, said at an April 3 Senate Committee hearing. “How’s that fair?”

Barrett told the senator that the lottery’s available seats are meant to reflect the economic makeup of a community’s children. In other words, if 80% of a city’s population falls within or below a certain income, then in a classroom with 10 free seats, eight would go to kids from that income bracket. The other two would go to kids with income over that amount. The kids are still chosen randomly from their respective pools. But families with different incomes aren’t in direct competition.

The state-run pre-K lottery opened this year on April 26 and will close at 11:59 p.m. on June 24. As of May 31 , more than 2,500 applications had been received for the upcoming school year, according to the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), which oversees the lottery and RI Pre-K.

Both public pre-kindergarten programs and Head Start, the federal early education program for lower-income children that began in 1965 under President Lyndon B. Johnson, boost low-income preschoolers’ kindergarten skills. Researchers have found “marginal” improvements in literacy and “significant” improvements in math when the pre-K students reached kindergarten. Self-regulation skills, or how children manage their behavior, went basically unchanged.

But Head Start programs have never been adequately funded at the state or federal level to provide for everyone eligible, so families must apply and be accepted. State-funded pre-K can fill in gaps for families who have more money than Head Start allows, but can’t pay for pre-K on their own.

Gov. Dan McKee’s proposed budget for fiscal 2025 includes $30 million for early childhood education, up from $22.9 million in fiscal 2024. The $7.1 million increase would mean increasing the number of RI Pre-K seats from 2,800 now to 3,000 for next year, putting the state closer to its goal of securing 5,000 pre-K seats by 2028 — a goal announced in 2022.

In 2023, of the 2,364 children enrolled in RI Pre-K, 1,807, or 76%, were low-income, according to the KIDS COUNT 2024 Factbook. The other 557 kids, or 24%, were higher-income — a distinction, Barrett noted, that is not synonymous with being rich.

‘I have to get my kids in preschool’

Phrathep knew pre-K would be as valuable for her youngest son Noah, now 7, and daughter Scarlette as it had for her eldest son, Jaidan, now 23, who attended preschool years ago. At the time, Phrathep was enrolled at Rhode Island College (RIC), which offered students who were parents affordable pre-K at the Cooperative Preschool on its campus.

Jaidan Phrathep is a recent graduate of the University of Rhode Island who now works as a caseworker and wants to pursue a master’s degree. But as a toddler, Phrathep said her son had communication issues.

“I could understand him because I was his mom. But then nobody else really could,” Phrathep said.

Phrathep worked and went to school during her son’s early years, so her parents would babysit him. Her father is fluent in English, and her mother could speak some. But at home, Phrathep’s parents enjoyed the comfort of speaking Lao, their native tongue. Phrathep wondered if her son was encountering a language barrier, or if he had a learning disability.

“Once he got into preschool, he developed his language skills,” Phrathep said. “He learned all his letters and numbers, he was writing his name, he was writing words. So just seeing that, I was like, ‘I have to get my kids in preschool.’ I would have been devastated if they didn’t get in anywhere.”

Parents seeking a RI Pre-K seat are asked for a few details — like their child’s name, date of birth and address, as well as monthly household income — then their shortlist for three schools they would like their child to attend. Phrathep picked Providence’s Beautiful Beginnings for Noah and Scarlette, praising the staff’s attentiveness, care and rapport with families. Both Noah and Scarlette were able to attend Beautiful Beginnings as their mother hoped.

“I don’t really remember my other choices to be honest,” Phrathep said. “Because I was so set on Beautiful Beginnings.”

Where families live matters

RI Pre-K has expanded steadily since its debut in 2009, primarily funded with state money, said Barrett, in a Zoom call on May 1 focused on early childhood education organized by the RIght from the Start campaign, a policy initiative of the child advocacy coalition which includes KIDS COUNT.

RIght from the Start launched a campaign early in the legislative session calling for support for early educator staffing, child care assistance, Head Start and pre-K expansion and paid family leave. The campaign included a May 9 advocacy day during which parents, kids and strollers marched to Capitol Hill.

“We’ve seen other parts of our system decline or be stagnant,” Barrett said. “We have lost $46 million in state general revenue funding for the child care assistance program , and we now serve less than half the number of children that we served 20 years ago.”

Victor Morente, an education department spokesperson, estimated that 10,000 children statewide would be old enough to qualify for eligibility for the 2024-2025 school year. In practice, many of those kids can’t actually apply for the lottery, since only 21 of Rhode Island’s 39 communities participate in the program. Unlike some states which offer 3-year-olds free education, Rhode Island requires a child to be age 4 by Sept. 1. Kids must also reside in the community where the pre-K provider is based.

At an April 3 meeting of the Senate Committee on Education, Chair Sen. Sandra Cano introduced bill S2519 , and identified a common bump in the lottery process for this much-demanded service. The Pawtucket Democrat said her daughter attended early childhood programs at Progreso Latino but couldn’t attend RI Pre-K in the same school because the family was not based in Central Falls. Education officials testifying that night told Cano such a process already existed, and that Cano’s daughter should have been able to matriculate from day care to pre-K.

“I also have other constituents that went through that. That just doesn’t happen,” Cano said, and added that her problem eventually did get fixed. “I had to fight and call, but obviously I know how to do that…But parents don’t know how to do this.”

Cano’s bill would clarify the matriculation process for kids ‘graduating’ into state pre-K. Cano revised the bill and its updated version — now sans a stipulation regarding “economically disadvantaged” kids — passed committee on May 8. After a successful 34-0 Senate floor vote on May 16, Cano’s bill now heads to the House Committee on Finance. It’s not yet scheduled for a hearing as of Friday, May 31.

Barrett is a frequent presence at the State House and testified on Cano’s bill at the April 3 hearing. Barrett is also an encyclopedic source of knowledge on issues affecting Rhode Island’s youngest citizens. But figuring out the structure of Rhode Island Pre-K can be a Herculean task even for a pro like herself.

“Everything in my world is extremely complex. This is the most complex,” Barrett said in a recent interview.

Cano’s attempt at legislating clarity around pre-K seats had the right intentions, Barrett told lawmakers, but the bill’s language was at times “very confusing” — a claim Barrett also leveled at the education department’s delivery of its own policies. The department “has been very flexible,” Barrett said.

But also: “I do think the communication problems are severe,” she added.

Head Start and RI Pre-K: What’s the difference?

Early childhood education is so complex at least partially because of its funding, Barrett said. Rhode Island Pre-K shares some coffers with Head Start. The state’s braided funding approach began about three years ago, tying together the longstanding Head Start and the much newer RI Pre-K.

But this is where things can get confusing: Some RI Pre-K classroom seats are housed in Head Start agencies.

About 40% of RI Pre-K classrooms now are in Head Start agencies. Sometimes, kids can be enrolled in both programs. There were 285 kids dually enrolled in both Head Start and RI Pre-K in 2023, according to the KIDS COUNT Factbook.

“In some cases, they run separate classrooms next to each other: One that’s labeled RI Pre-K and one that’s labeled Head Start,” Barrett said. Other providers combine the two together.

Those are only two possible arrangements. At Over the Rainbow Learning Centers in Johnston and Providence, co-owners and sisters Veronica Manfredi and Minerva Waldron offer pre-kindergarten for kids ages 3 through 5. But the state-funded students aren’t in the same classrooms as parents who pay out of pocket.

“Our state pre-K is strictly for 4-year-olds that only come from the lottery,” Manfredi said. “They cannot be mixed [with other kids].”

Once he got into preschool, he developed his language skills. He learned all his letters and numbers, he was writing his name, he was writing words. So just seeing that, I was like, ‘I have to get my kids in preschool.’

– Vanida Phrathep, a Providence mother of three, recalling her eldest son’s success as a preschooler

Overall, Barrett said 70% of kids are in a “community-based classroom that’s not operated by a public school,” whether they attend RI Pre-K or Head Start, with both programs considered high-quality .

Yet in Rhode Island, Head Start enrollment has started to decline as RI Pre-K has grown.

“I’m a big fan of Head Start, but it’s only been focused on the lowest income kids. And because of that, politically it’s challenging to provide very high quality services for only part of the population,” Barrett said.

Rhode Island’s state pre-K currently meets all 10 benchmarks set by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) at Rutgers University.

“Honestly, it’s amazing that Rhode Island does as well as it does in Head Start and pre-K,” said W. Steven Barnett, an early childhood education expert and the institute’s founder and senior director, who participated in the RIght from the Start Zoom call. “The quality is pretty high. I think it’s not sustainable, without more at that level in the future with expansion, without also putting in more money per kid.”

The options, Barnett said, are serving fewer kids, or significantly increasing investment to serve more kids. But even creative forms of investment like braided funding can lead to problems. Barnett gave an example of North Carolina, which is “farther down this road and then started on this path a lot sooner than Rhode Island” in terms of blended and braided funding.

“There were places where 85% of the eligible children were being served,” Barnett said. “In other counties, 15% of the eligible children were being served. And it all came back to what kind of other resources did they have to blend and braid. Some places had a lot and other places didn’t.”

State pre-K, then, might be like a Trojan Horse — a way to deliver quality services regardless of income but in a package ostensibly designed as welfare. If so, then Bill S2843 by Sen. Hanna Gallo, a Cranston Democrat and longtime member of the Senate Committee on Education, is more like a battering ram, getting straight to the point of expanding education for all of Rhode Island’s youngest. The three-pronged approach calls for investment in RI Pre-K, Head Start and Early Head Start for all of Rhode Island’s 3- and 4-year-olds.

Like Cano’s pre-K bill, Gallo’s was introduced before committee on April 3 and then revised. The Senate OK’d its amended version with a 29-5 floor vote on May 16, and it now goes to the House Committee on Finance. A companion House bill by Rep. Joseph McNamara, a Warwick Democrat, has not seen any action since an April 30 committee hearing.

The inclusion of 3-year-olds in state pre-K would be “wonderful,” Johnston child care provider Manfredi said. “I think they (legislators) need to open more doors for families that don’t usually qualify for the state voucher and don’t usually make the lottery because of their income.”

Gallo’s bill also aims to address the lesser-known wage gap between pre-K and kindergarten teachers. Community-based RI Pre-K teachers make $28,000 less than a kindergarten teacher, Barrett said, and Head Start teachers make $32,000 less than kindergarten teachers.

The average kindergarten teacher in Rhode Island made $83,080 in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Preschool and child care administrators made around $53,900. And while the Bureau doesn’t specify Head Start workers, it cites an average annual income of $34,550 for child care workers.

Barnett said that as state pre-K programs grow, so do teacher salaries. Novice teachers are cheaper when a program starts out. But at some point their experience will necessitate higher wages. Growing provider costs have been compounded by a changing market, Barnett added.

“Post-pandemic, the low end of the job market has come under a lot of pay pressure,” he said. If pre-K providers “can work for more money at a big box store,” their passion for education might be outpaced by the reality of need.

That contrasts the beginnings of RI Pre-K. Instituted right at the tail end of the Great Recession, a 2008 exploratory committee was formed to find new ways to educate the state’s preschoolers amid federally-slashed budgets for social services. Also, teachers needed work.

“At that time, it was easy to find empty classrooms, qualified teachers willing to work for sub-kindergarten teacher wages, and lots of children who didn’t qualify for anything else, and families who could not afford child care or Pre-K,” wrote KIDS COUNT’s Barrett.

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