Commissioners Punt On Bright Beginnings Grant
After a week’s worth of squabbling about whether to vote on earmarking a $10 million special grant to help save the Bright Beginnings pre-kindergarten program, Mecklenburg commissioners on Tuesday night stepped up to the plate and resolutely deferred a decision until April.
The move leaves the fate of Bright Beginnings in tenuous limbo, with the school board slated to vote next week on the Superintendent Peter Gorman’s recommendation to cut $10 million from the program, shrinking it from 175 classes that serve 3,200 students to 70 classes and 1,178 kids.
Commissioner Vilma Leake had requested that the county board consider providing a $10 million grant specific to Bright Beginnings in surplus of any funding Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools received as part of its normal budget allocation, which won’t be determined until later in the year.
But after hearing Tuesday night that school leaders had ranked the program as a funding priority below several other needs, Leake’s motion was tweaked to direct the county manager to explore the option of pursuing the grant with school leaders. A vote on that motion, in turn, was deferred until April, with Commissioner Harold Cogdell casting the lone vote in dissent.
Before voting on the deferral, Commissioners Chairman Jennifer Roberts related that in a meeting earlier in the day Gorman and school board chair Eric Davis were pleased to hear that the county was considering additional funding for education, but had indicated that Bright Beginnings ranked in priority behind about $43 million worth of other cuts that have been recommended as CMS faces a potential $100 million shortfall.
Those other funding priorities, Roberts said, include decreasing class sizes (which would save 250 teacher positions); reconfiguring the district’s weighted student staffing formula (saving 134 teacher positions); restoring one educational support position in each school (saving 164 jobs); and adding teacher assistant positions (saving 150 jobs).
“They did not say they would not accept a discussion about a grant that would be focused on pre-K,” Roberts said. “They clearly are telling us it’s not in their top four priorities of what they’d add back.”
Added Commissioners Vice Chairman Jim Pendergraph, who also had met with Gorman and Davis: “I don’t think this [Bright Beginnings] is something they want to do away with because they don’t like it. They’re just trying to prioritize where they think the most bang for the dollar would be if they get extra money. They’re trying to do the best they can with the few dollars they have.”
The cuts to Bright Beginnings, though, are at this point just a CMS staff recommendation, said Commissioner Dumont Clarke, which the school board has yet to officially vote on. Deferring a decision on a possible $10 million grant for the program, he said, was appropriate to allow commissioners a chance to determine where school board members stand on the proposal.
It might not take long to get an answer. The school board is expected to vote next Tuesday on the recommended cut for Bright Beginnings. That didn’t prevent commissioners, however, from scheduling a Feb. 15 meeting with school board members to discuss the $10 million earmark for the program, prior to the county board’s scheduled vote in April when they will decide whether to direct the county manager to formally begin exploring the possibility with school officials.
Cogdell said he thought Bright Beginnings was a worthy program, but voted against deferring the grant issue because of the precedent it sets.
“Are we going to identify one specific program within the CMS budget and say it’s so important to this board … and begin to enter into the purview of telling the board of education what its priorities should be,” Cogdell said.
Doing so, he argued, would put commissioners on a slippery slope.
“We open the door to the library system, to the community college, to every other community partner that has an argument to make that this is a critical need in our community and we should identify that specific need and carve that out in advance to the manager’s recommended budget,” Cogdell said.
Deferring a vote to explore a special $10 million grant for Bright Beginnings, he said, was simply punting the issue down the field.
But by keeping the grant in play, Roberts argued, commissioners were showing that they thought Bright Beginnings was an important program that deserved further consideration for earmark funding, even if it comes at a later date, because “we see, as a social services organization, all the impacts when children don’t have the additional resources at an early age. That was the thinking behind the timing.”
All of which likely sets the stage for a massive lobbying effort from Bright Beginning advocates to save the program. They’ve already turned out en masse at previous school board meetings, and were at it again during Tuesday night’s commissioners meeting.
Advocates for the program contend that it’s key in early childhood development for at-risk students and provides long-term benefit that provides a substantial return on investment. Existing data on the program, however, shows mixed results, with any demonstrable academic gains attributed to the program disappearing after the third grade.
The CMS program currently serves nearly one out of every three students entering kindergarten and the recommended cuts would shrink that number to one out of ever five, Janet Singerman, president of Childcare Resources, told commissioners.
“The cuts come when our capacity for free and affordable pre-k and other early education programs is already too limited,” Singerman said. “The waiting list for BB right now is more than 1,300 children, and the waiting list for childcare subsidy in Mecklenburg County totals 6,350 children, of which 640 are four-year-olds.”
Added Brett Loftis, executive director of the Council for Children’s Rights, “We’re known throughout the country for having a strong, publicly-funded pre-K program, and that about to be decimated.
“I wouldn’t normally ask you to say anything to the school board about what they should do or not do,” Loftis told commissioners. “But these are not normal times.”
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