What you should know:
President Obama is expected to be in Atlanta between 11:30 a.m. and 2:40 p.m. on Thursday. He’ll be landing at Dobbins Air Force Base and will travel to the College Heights preschool and the Decatur Recreational Center, where he plans to make remarks at 1:20 p.m.
President Barack Obama is expected to propose during his Thursday visit to metro Atlanta that the federal government expand the Head Start preschool program, which is designed to prepare children from low-income families for school.
Obama also plans to back a new partnership with states to provide preschool for every 4-year-old from low- and middle-income families, according to details from the White House that emerged hours before his scheduled visit.
The plan would be funded through with federal matching dollars for public preschool slots for families who earn at or below 200 percent of the poverty level. The White House would dole out extra funds for states that expand public preschool slots for more middle-class families. And it would provide incentives for states that expand the availability of full-day kindergarten programs.
Some critics have argued that states or private programs could spend the money on preschool programs more efficiently than the federal government. Gov. Nathan Deal said one way to cut costs and improve early childhood education would be to give states more control of funds from the federal Head Start program.
“If we had the money that is put into our state through the Head Start program – if it were given to the state to administer – we could get a lot better results in the long term from combining that federal money with the state money that we use for the pre-k program,” he said.
Deal, a Republican, told the AJC he recently asked federal officials to release the funds to Georgia but has not received an answer.
Obama’s visit comes as part of a three-state swing promoting his State of the Union agenda. In the Tuesday speech, he gave a shout-out to Georgia as an early-education leader and pledged to “make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.” He mentioned Georgia as an example of a state “that makes it a priority to educate our youngest children.”
The president will visit the Decatur Recreational Center as well as the College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center, which offers day care and pre-k classes. The school is on break this week, but students were given a chance to come to see the president.
Georgia is considered a leader in early childhood education as the first state to have voluntary pre-kindergarten for all 4-year-olds, regardless of family income. About 84,000 4-year-olds, 60 percent of them from low-income families, are enrolled in the lottery-funded program, though about 8,000 are on waiting lists.
But soaring enrollment and flagging lottery revenues have forced the state to cut back on preschool offerings, raising concerns from some advocates that the state’s pre-kindergarten program is stumbling.
W. Steven Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said three states have already integrated Head Start programs into their pre-k systems without any changes in federal law. In those cases, he said, the state tops up funding to meet state standards.
“It seems likely the federal government will simply tip the scale in favor of new state and local investments in early education, not pay most of the bill,” he said. “But states are eager to do this. For the states, it is like a half-off sale on high-quality preschool education for low- and middle-income Americans.”
About the Author
