When Gov. Gavin Newsom held a press conference at a Monterey County elementary school in May 2021, he announced historic funding for a pre-kindergarten grade, hailing his multibillion-dollar proposal as key to California’s pandemic recovery.
Achieving universal access to transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds, he said, “is so foundational and so important” toward narrowing the so-called readiness gap between kids in lower-income families and those in middle-income families before their traditional schooling begins. Providing a free, high-quality early education program not only benefits youngsters but allows parents to return to the workforce, Newsom said.
But the beginning of a three-year, $2.7 billion plan to expand transitional kindergarten, or TK, is off to an uneven start. Administrators at some public school districts who had hoped expansion would offset the statewide decline in student enrollment are seeing low turnouts at the start of this school year. Other districts report high demand from parents seeking child care relief.
In Salinas, about 400 students are eligible by age to enter transitional kindergarten, but less than half were enrolled when school began last week. It’s a sharp drop-off from pre-pandemic years, when nearly all children who were qualified for TK showed up, according to Jim Koenig, superintendent of Alisal Union School District.
Meanwhile, the superintendent of the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, estimates that more than 10,000 school-age children weren’t registered for the school year that began Monday. He believes many of them are concentrated in the earliest grades, from transitional kindergarten through first grade.
“We’re very concerned about that loss of enrollment because we’re not seeing a spike of enrollment in other school settings,” Alberto M. Carvahlo said at a recent news conference, referring to private and charter schools.
Carvahlo said school administrators went into neighborhoods to track the missing students, and found that many of their families moved out of state or shifted to homeschooling. In some cases, older students were staying home to care for their younger siblings.
Participation in TK was rising statewide before COVID-19, but dropped by 23% for the 2020-21 school year. The greatest decline was among Black and Native American children and kids from lower-income families, according to an analysis of enrollment data by the Public Policy Institute of California.
The lingering toll of COVID
In the Salinas Valley, the coronavirus hit the working class hard — and the toll has lingered.
The Alisal Union district serves about 7,500 students, mostly children of immigrants and farmworkers in East Salinas, 70% of whom are English learners. Koenig thinks some of these working parents are still worried about COVID. Salinas, about 85 miles southeast of San Francisco, is the most populous city in Monterey County.
“I think they’re just still concerned about enrolling these very young kids in school and possibly exposing them to the virus,” Koenig said.
The rate of COVID infection among farmworkers in the Salinas Valley was four times higher than in the rest of the local population during the later half of 2020, according to a study that suggested crowded housing as a contributing factor.
Only 5% of children under 4 in Monterey County have gotten the COVID vaccine, though it’s not clear whether that is driving under-enrollment. Nationwide, children are behind on routine immunizations against illnesses such as measles, mumps and pertussis, which are required to attend public school. In California, the COVID vaccine will not be a requirement for students until at least the 2023-24 school year. Many school districts have relaxed masking rules.
School is not mandatory in California until kids turn 6, but years of research have detailed how pre-kindergarten shapes young brains and advances children’s development.
