As Transitional Kindergarten Grows, Hundreds of Child Care Centers Close

As public school enrollment continues to decline across California, a remarkable thing is happening in districts: More students are entering transitional kindergarten. But that growth has come at a cost.

Community-based preschools across the state have struggled to compete with free TK, and many have shuttered — worsening the shortage of licensed child care spaces for children younger than 4 years old.

Between 2019 and 2025, around 1,100 preschools have closed their doors across California, representing just under 10% of the total, according to research published Monday by UC Berkeley’s Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood. They were licensed to serve around 32,000 young children, and experts say their closures will likely increase prices in a state where the average annual cost of infant care surpasses $20,000.

“These centers are not coming back. We’re going to lose these places forever,” said Bruce Fuller, an education professor at UC Berkeley and co-author of the report.

The closures were not what policymakers had in mind in 2021, when they decided to implement a four-year, multibillion-dollar plan to roll out the largest universal pre-kindergarten program in the nation. Enrollment grew from nearly 117,000 students in the 2022-23 school year to 213,000 students this year. State leaders had hoped the move would free up space in preschools for 3-year-olds and that centers would pivot to caring for more infants and toddlers.

The state is making progress, though at a slower pace than TK, in enrolling 3-year-olds into the California State Preschool Program, a subsidized program that can either be provided by school districts or community-based organizations for income-eligible families.

But Fuller said fewer than one-third of 3-year-olds are enrolled in preschool of any kind, and he’s worried about their shrinking access to early education. Research shows that two years of high-quality preschool is especially beneficial to children from low-income households.

Assemblymember Corey Jackson, a Democrat from Riverside County who chairs a state subcommittee on human services, said legislators are aware that TK pulled children from community-based programs and are trying to address the issue as they negotiate next year’s state budget.

“We have to recognize and learn from the lessons of the pandemic,” he said. “There may come a time where we might have to close our schools down again, so what happens when we have decimated our community infrastructure, when we still may need places for our children to go safely?”

Community-based preschools had long warned they might not be able to survive financially if they lose 4-year-olds to TK. Their business models are shaped by laws that mandate a ratio of one teacher for every four infants or toddlers, and one teacher for every dozen 4-year-olds. Tuition from the older children helps offset the more expensive care of children under 2.

A similar scenario bore out more than a dozen years ago in New York City, when it provided free preschool for 4-year-olds in a “mixed delivery system” that included public schools, private or community-based preschools. Many providers shifted to serving the older kids for the stable income it provided and cut back on infant and toddler care.

“We have seen such large benefits of public pre-K that I think it should be a good investment, but you want to be aware of the unintended consequences on the ability to find care for those younger kids, and trying to make sure that the market can still sustain that and that it’s affordable for parents,” said Jessica H. Brown, an economist at the University of South Carolina who studied the impact of New York’s “Pre-K For All” initiative.

In California, community-based preschools or child care centers must reconfigure classrooms and meet higher fire safety standards, for example, to serve children younger than 2 years old. These regulatory and financial hurdles often hinder their ability to shift to infant care, or even shift to providing after-school care, because the cost of transportation and insurance is often prohibitively expensive, said Erin Freschi, director of resource and referral at CoCo Kids, an agency that connects families to child care providers in Contra Costa County.

“A lot of the response has been, ‘Oh, just serve infants and toddlers or just do after-school care,’ and it’s not that easy,” she said.

Researchers at UC Berkeley found that community-based preschools most vulnerable to closure were based in churches, were small programs serving 30 to 50 children, or ones that relied on state and federal funds to provide subsidized care to lower-income families. Only about 15% made the transition lawmakers had initially envisioned and switched to serving infants and toddlers.

“We had expected that a lot of the closures were tuition-charging places in middle or upper middle-class communities, and that is true. Three in five of the places that closed were charging tuition, but two in five were actually publicly financed,” Fuller said.

Transitional kindergarten isn’t the only contributor to these programs’ demise. The pandemic, followed by rising costs of living, destabilized their operations. Centers that provide subsidized care are competing with increased state funding for vouchers, which allow low-income families to choose between licensed care or unlicensed care at home by a family, friend or neighbor.

An analysis by the California Budget & Policy Center found that between 2021 and 2024, families increasingly chose unlicensed care, which grew by 110%.

“No single program tells the whole story,” said Patricia Lozano, director of the advocacy group Early Edge California.

She suggested giving public funds to help more community-based programs pivot to serving babies and toddlers “to make sure no one is left behind.”

As budget negotiations get underway in Sacramento, there’s talk of moving some $120 million in funding from Prop 98, which guarantees a minimum funding level for public schools each year, to support community-based organizations in the California State Preschool Program and permanently fund seats for 2-year-olds in that program.

“We are serious about child care, and we know it’s expensive, but that also means that more and more families need relief, and it’s a part of making California affordable again,” Jackson said. “We have to provide these services in order to be able to make sure families are able to make it here and thrive here in California.”

A combination of these forces are playing out in preschools like Carquinez Garden School, the only licensed child care center in Crockett, a Bay Area community of 3,600. The school will close in July after enrollment dwindled from more than 30 children two years ago to just 10 this year.

“We’ve lost essentially a class of kids every year to TK,” said Heather Posner, the school’s director.

She said she expected to serve fewer 4-year-olds as TK rolled out, and that more 2-year-olds would take their spots. The preschool was in a so-called child care desert with an insufficient supply of licensed care. The monthly cost for full-time care — $1,870 — didn’t seem to deter demand; the school had a waitlist and enrolled families who qualified for subsidies.

“But it seems like the low birth rate is causing a lot of schools to be underenrolled on both ends,” she said. “You’re not getting a lot of 2-year-olds and then you’re not getting any 4-year-olds … so with 10 kids, there’s just no way to really cover the overhead.”

Trying to keep the school open felt like performing CPR on a patient, she said, and she barely broke even.

“I basically have not paid myself in two years. Literally, I cannot pay my own salary,” she said.

Fuller said researchers took California’s declining child population into account when they calculated the effect of TK expansion on thousands of communities. They concluded that for every 200 students who enrolled in public TK, there would be a reduction of 38 seats at community-based programs.

In Berkeley, a surge in public TK enrollment during the last four years caused The Berkeley School’s early childhood program to lose more than two-thirds of its students, dropping from 90 to about 25. It will close in July after serving local children for more than six decades.

“It’s a loss for our community, it’s a loss for our school as a whole,” said Mitch Bostian, head of the private school, which serves kids aged 4 to 14 and practices the Montessori philosophy of mixing children of different ages in the classroom so that younger children learn from observing older peers, and older students develop leadership skills by mentoring younger peers.

That model unraveled when the local school district added more TK classrooms.

“Really what we saw was the bottom dropped out of our 4- and 5-year-olds,” Bostian said.

He said the school began enrolling younger children, including 2-year-olds, added year-round options and extended its hours to attract working families, but couldn’t bring enrollment up to a sustainable level.

For Posner, the shuttering of Carquinez Garden School represents the loss of a tight-knit community she formed with families. Every Friday, parents hang out in the yard when they come to pick up their children. Once a month, they gather for a potluck.

The school takes advantage of being right next to a regional park and lets children learn through playing outdoors.

“They’re running, they’re digging, they’re riding bikes, they’re hanging from the climbing structure, they’re being active, they’re using their brains and bodies and they’re with their friends,” she said.

Posner fears that when the kids enter TK, they’ll have less time to play outside and develop friendships.

“Everything’s truncated,” she said. “And I feel the gift that I can give them is just that languishing outside in the sunshine.”