Early last month, the Chronicle reported on a movement of parents to convince the Croton-Harmon Board of Education and school officials to adequately fund Universal Pre-K (Pre-Kindergarten) in our district. Shortly afterwards, more than two dozen parents showed up to a BoE meeting to ask the district to fill a funding gap between what New York State provides for each child and the actual cost of Pre-K programs.
As we reported, “While New York State provides a subsidy of just under $5000 per child for a limited number of public Pre-K slots, the actual cost of Pre-K can be up to $10,000 annually per child. For the 56 spaces in the district’s current public Pre-K program, that means a funding gap of about $257,000, the advocates had calculated.”
But at that December 4 meeting, the co-directors of Childrenspace North in Croton, where the district’s Pre-K program is currently hosted, told the Board that they were willing to continue the program at cost, which would significantly reduce the amount of money needed to keep it going. Indeed, one parent told the Board that the offer by Childrenspace North would reduce the funding gap to only about $150,000 annually, out of the district’s $61 million budget.
(Although that budget had been increased by $2.2 million for the fiscal year 2025-26, none of those additional funds had been earmarked for Pre-K.)
Nevertheless, school superintendent Stephen Walker reassured the parents that the district was not going to abandon Pre-K, and that he and his staff were working on a plan.
Last Thursday, January 8, the parents returned to this first BoE meeting of the year to hear news about the district’s plan and to continue to press their case. More than 50 parents showed up, and 15 spoke to the Board during the public comments segment to tell their stories and present their arguments.
Superintendent Walker then gave a report on several school matters, including the latest good news about academic achievement, before turning to the Pre-K question. Instead of handling that issue himself, Walker handed it over to Rachel DePaul, the Assistant Superintendent for Pupil Personnel Services, who gave a Powerpoint presentation on progress to date.
After inviting parents to attend a “Preschool Tea” on January 21, DePaul gave the meeting a briefing on what was being done towards preserving Pre-K in the district. There is some long-term good news about statewide funding of Pre-K, which was recently announced by Governor Kathy Hochul. As part of a new partnership with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the state plans to expand funding of Pre-K programs, although the details remain uncertain and most of the new money will not be in place before 2028.
As for what the district itself would do in the short term, almost all of what DePaul described appeared to be very tentative and conditional on negotiations with Pre-K providers, as well as with neighboring school districts, and on finding space in the Croton-Harmon district’s schools to run Pre-K programs (the theory being that overhead would be less if in-house space were used.)
At one point, DePaul mistakenly characterized the position of the co-directors of Childrenspace North, saying that they no longer wanted to run the program—a statement very much at odds with what those directors, Staci Hall and Sarah Forth, had told the Board in person at the December meeting.
We asked DePaul to clarify her statement, but she did not respond to our query. Nevertheless, we did speak with Hall and Forth, who told us that they were still engaged in “productive conversations” with the district and that their offer was still on the table. Hall and Forth thought that DePaul had misspoken rather than deliberately mischaracterized their position.
On the other hand, the Chronicle has been told by sources at the Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School (CET) that there is no extra space for running a Pre-K program. Whether there might be space in other district schools is not clear, although CET is the location that DePaul specifically mentioned.
But DePaul’s presentation also made clear that what the district would be offering in the fall was not Universal Pre-K (UPK.) Thus while the district intends to issue Requests for Proposals (RFPs) to possible new program providers shortly, and hopes to award new contracts in February (see timeline below), parents will still have to go through a lottery system to win a space for their children. While there is hope that the state will increase the level of its per-child grants for the fall, DePaul gave no indication as to how many slots there might be—or whether there would be any expansion in that number any time soon.
In a January 10 letter to parents involved in the Pre-K movement, local parent Jacob Day, who has spearheaded the UPK drive, credited the mobilization for coaxing district officials into addressing the issue and taking it seriously.
Yet in a section of his letter subheaded “But What We Did’t Hear…” Day asked, “How does any of this close the funding gap? What is the plan for saving UPK?” [Boldface in the original.)
While some of the proposed measures, such as using district space, sharing services with other districts, and a different provider model might help save money, Day observed, parents still don’t know how much difference it will make because “they didn’t show us the numbers and they did not commit to using district funds.” [Boldface in the original]
Day pointed out that if Governor Hochul’s plan to double Pre-K funding to $10,000 per child by 2028 passes the state’s budget process and becomes reality, the Croton-Harmon district would only have to bridge the funding gap for two or three years.
Day urged parents to return and speak to the Board of Education again at its February 12 meeting, and in the meantime to spread the world and continue lobbying district officials.
This is an ongoing story and the Chronicle will continue to cover it closely.
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Croton's current UPK provider -- who is hemorrhaging money to keep the program afloat this year -- has an excellent program that the community loves. The BOE however doesn't seem to view UPK as an important part of a child's education. If it did, it would clearly agree to partially fund the current provider, at least in the short-term, an amount equal to 0.35% of the overall school budget (for context, the district spent three times that amount on “computer hardware” last year).
I was surprised to hear there was no room at CET for a UPK program. I was under the impression that enrollment significantly decreased in the elementary school and there was more space available.