A Republican legislator from Alabama made the case for state-supported early childhood education Wednesday during a meeting of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s Pre-K for All Advisory Committee in Kentucky.
Rep. Jeana Ross, a former educator and former secretary of her state’s Department of Early Childhood Education, said Alabama’s pre-K program “has survived Democratic and Republican governors” and has “always been a bipartisan program with bipartisan support and strong local and community support as well.”
Ross was key in creating Alabama’s program at a time when research about brain development in young children was receiving more attention, she said.
“It became evident that (in) these early years, a lot was going on,” Ross said. “The brain development and the experiences that children had early absolutely set their trajectory for the rest of their lives.”
The committee also heard from Steven Barnett, the founder and senior co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, who said that children who attend pre-kindergarten are more likely to be ready for kindergarten, be healthier and live longer.
During the legislative session that convenes in January, Kentucky lawmakers will adopt the next two-year state budget. That probably will be Beshear’s last chance to win funding for pre-K for all Kentucky 4-year-olds, a proposal he has unsuccessfully pushed with the Republican-controlled legislature. Kentucky governors are limited to two terms, and Beshear’s second term ends in 2027.
In June, he signed an executive order establishing the advisory committee to explore support for universal pre-kindergarten programs in Kentucky.
During Wednesday’s Zoom meeting, the committee learned about what other states have done in public preschool programs.
Barnett said pre-K has a domino effect on multiple parts of life.
“If you set those kinds of things up, you can then produce substantial improvements in later achievement, decreases in the need for special education, decreased failure and grade retention, and those things lead to increased educational attainment, more high school graduation, more post secondary enrollment,” Barnett told the committee.“Once you have that higher educational achievement, a whole host of other benefits follow: less crime, higher earnings, better jobs, better health. People will actually live longer.”
During his weekly press conference Wednesday, Beshear said that since establishing the committee, people have sent more than 22,000 emails to legislators expressing support for universal pre-K in Kentucky.
The committee has also held town halls in Bowling Green, Morehead, Frankfort and Northern Kentucky, which were “incredibly successful” and “very well attended,” according to Sam Flynn, the executive director for the Team Kentucky Pre-K for All Program.
“It’s a no-brainer: Everybody wins by making pre-K accessible to every 4-year-old Kentucky child, including our businesses, our families, our kids and our economy,” Beshear said. One in five Kentucky children currently live in poverty.
Beshear also cited recently published research that found parents benefit in their careers by having access to universal pre-K for their children.
Flynn said “a significant number of” school superintendents in the state have “either reached out to us — or we’ve spoken directly to them — saying how much they support this.”
‘Be very brave’
From the beginning of Alabama’s work to make a successful pre-K program, Ross said, it was important to communicate “the importance of early childhood education and what it meant for our communities in our state as a whole.”
Additionally, she said, “we knew that if the quality was not there, you may be doing more harm than good. So the quality was critical, and we built that from day one.”
The committee chose to examine Alabama because of the state’s similar characteristics to Kentucky. It also looked at Georgia and Iowa.
Andrea Day, a division director for the Department for Community Based Services, within the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, said that Alabama and Georgia residents spend the lowest percentage of their income on child care for 4-year-olds. Kentuckians, in contrast, spend the most — 10% of annual income for one child, Day said.
To launch a successful pre-K program, Ross said, states have to “be very brave and take a few risks.”
In Kentucky, about 63% of Kentucky’s children ages 3 and 4 were not in school from 2019-2023, an increase from 58% from 2014-2018. In 2024, 67% of Kentucky’s fourth graders were less than proficient in reading. That’s up from 65% in 2019.
That same year, most — 76% — of eighth graders in the state weren’t proficient in math, up from 71% in 2019. From 2021-2022, 10% of high school students did not graduate on time, an increase from 9% in 2019, according to the report.
Alabama’s voluntary pre-K program has not achieved universal enrollment despite being recognized for its high quality.
Alabama was able to show that students who went through pre-K education were less likely to need special education services and more likely to attend class when they entered K-12, Ross said.
“By the time they left that program, not only did they catch up, but they were ready for kindergarten,” Ross said. “And we could prove it.”
This story was originally published by the Kentucky Lantern.
