Georgia will have about 306 fewer pre-kindergarten classes next fall -- 59 fewer in metro Atlanta’s four largest counties -- and a statewide waiting list of several thousand 4-year-olds.
Fewer classes, each with more students, are part of a plan to keep the lottery-funded pre-k and HOPE scholarships from going broke.
About $54 million in cuts are slated for pre-k when the new fiscal year kicks in July 1.
The cuts also mean most pre-k teachers’ paychecks will be 10 percent smaller next year, and the school year for 86,000 4-year-olds will last 160 days, 20 fewer than this year. Some details of the cuts are rolling out as a new report has Georgia falling in a national ranking of spending on pre-k.
Linda Ramos, who has been in early childhood education for 16 years and a pre-k teacher for three years, said Wednesday that it’s hard to cope with so many changes coming so fast.
“They don’t understand that the ones that suffer are the children,” said Ramos, who lives in Villa Rica but works at a private pre-k in Marietta.
Most of the cuts emerged as alternatives to Gov. Nathan Deal’s call to make pre-k a part-time program to help it and the HOPE scholarship survive. Deal dropped the idea of reducing the length of the pre-k day after an outcry from parents, teachers and child advocates.
The governor also ordered the pre-k program to add 2,000 students to its rolls -- 3,000 fewer than he initially proposed but still a dent in a waiting list of 8,000 to 10,000 students.
In addition, pre-k class sizes are increasing from 20 students to 22 students, which is how officials are able to reduce the number of classes, statewide, from 4,215 this year to 3,909 next year.
Among the classes being cut are 18 in Fulton County,13 in Cobb County and nine in DeKalb County, according to Bright from the Start, the state agency that oversees Georgia pre-k.
State officials made the class cuts for next year based on a number of criteria, including the size of the local waiting lists and a county’s unemployment list, according to the department’s website. Pat Willis, executive director of the advocacy group Voices for Georgia's Children, said the decisions were made “with openness and engagement of all providers and advocates.”
But for Katy Arrowood, who operates pre-k programs in Athens, Bogart and Covington, learning that one of her two classes in Bogart is to be cut has been difficult.
"They said it had nothing to do with our program. It was just geographical," she said. "There's no appeal process, and that's frustrating."
Twenty parents had already registered their children and needed to be notified, and Arrowood is now scrambling to see whether she can put together a private paid program so she can keep all of her teachers and students.
"It's hard for us to swallow," said Arrowood, whose late father, former Rep. Earl O'Neal, worked with Gov. Zell Miller to create the pre-k program in the early 1990s. "I know the dream was to have it for all children."
The national take on Georgia pre-k
A new report shows that the state's often-lauded program has improved in quality but fallen in a national ranking in terms of state funding.
Based on 2009-2010 data, the study by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University ranks Georgia as 20th in state money spent per child, down from 17th the previous year.
The report shows state spending per child at $4,206, compared with the high of $11,578 per student in New Jersey. It also shows Georgia down a notch from its long-held position as third in the nation in access to pre-k but meeting nine of 10 benchmarks for quality, up from eight the previous year.
W. Steven Barnett, the institute's co-director, said Georgia would have been in line next year to receive a 10 out of 10 on the benchmarks for pre-k quality, having made "important progress last year on requiring specialized training for all its teachers and assistant teachers."
But he said that Perfect 10 won't happen now that the state is raising class size to 22 students.
"The research is clear that [student-teacher] ratio matters for how much children learn," Barnett said.
The 20-day reduction in the pre-k year also will hurt, particularly for disadvantaged children who need more class time, not less, he said.
"With the new cuts, this will be 10 years running of cuts to funding per child, and these are the most damaging cuts yet," Barnett said.
"Georgia was once a national leader in pre-k," he said. "In 2011, it will be more of a national leader in prisons than in pre-k."
Mindy Binderman, executive director of the Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, said the goal is to see that this year's pre-k cuts "are only temporary."
"As lottery revenues increase, we hope the first thing the Legislature and governor will focus on is ensuring that we are delivering a quality program to as many kids as we possibly can. That means increasing the days of the school year and decreasing class size and also provide the funding that these programs need to pay quality teachers."
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