Full-day K worth Jessamine taxpayers' dollars

Comment by Shark88: Friday, September 3

Ms. Dragomir, you can donate from your own personal funds to help the schools out. It is a free co...read more...

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For weeks I have grown so accustomed to writing acerbic retorts to Leland Conway’s columns with wh...read more...

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As Jessamine Early Learning Village moves from Wilmore to Nicholasville this year and implements full-day kindergarten for the first time, doubling the size of the school, the district has some concerns about the sustainability of the program it has been saving for and planning for years.

While Superintendent Lu Young said the district and the school board have no doubts about the importance of a full-day kindergarten program, some lackluster financial years and no additional funding from the state have caused officials to consider alternative funding sources.

“If I were to show all my cards, I would say that in five years of planning, we were hoping that the conditions would be right that the general assembly would pick up the cost for full-day (kindergarten),” Young said.

Despite recent initiatives focusing on the need for early-childhood education, Kentucky currently only funds half-day kindergarten programs; districts that run full-day programs get the money from their own pockets.

The school district has been leaving extra money in its general fund since the 2004-2005 school year for the purposes of implementing full-day kindergarten. The beginning fund balance in the 2005 fiscal year was slightly more than $4 million; the reserve peaked in the 2007 fiscal year when it reached $6.2 million. The economic downturn and budget cuts have slowly depleted funds since, as the beginning balance has dipped to $5.5 million for the 2010 fiscal year.

“We have increased that gradually each year to over $6 million,” Young said. “Last year and this year, because of the budget cuts we’ve had to absorb in the district, it’s down to about $5 million. We don’t have to keep the beginning fund balance that high, except that we were dedicating all that additional money — about $1.5 million — to the opening of full-day kindergarten.”

Critics had questioned why the district was saving up money and not spending it on teacher salaries or programming, Young said, but Kentucky’s system doesn’t allow districts to earmark funds in the general fund beginning balance.

“In our accounting system, there’s to way to earmark reserves,” she said. “If you were in business, you would have an earmarked reserve that says, ‘I’m socking away this money for such and such a project,’ so it shows up as a budget expenditure in order to hold that marking place, but ours just show up as pure reserves.”

The program had initially been estimated to cost about $500,000 each year; the district had been hoping to have enough in reserve to fund three years of full-day kindergarten. The district’s current price-tag estimate for full-day kindergarten is $893,000 per year.

“There are no non-recurring costs in that amount — none, because the non-recurring costs are in the construction, and that’s funded totally separately in Kentucky,” Young said.

The superintendent said the school district had to “pull the trigger” several years ago to get full-day kindergarten going when funds were high since the old middle school would have to be renovated to provide enough space.

“I had to have enough money to make that happen, [and] we made the decision to go ahead with the renovation,” Young said. “And so because we still don’t have funding for full-day kindergarten, we’re going to have to use all the reserves in order to fund [the program].”

Young said full-day kindergarten was “the right thing to do” for young students.

“What we anticipate we’ll find, based on studies, is that we will have kids who exit kindergarten into our primary program reading at higher levels than they’ve ever read before,” she said, “and then we’ll be able to sustain that in primary so that they exit at the end of third with all students reading on grade level.”

School officials will examine how other districts have handled the funding of full-day kindergarten while keeping eyes on the general assembly to see if the state will contribute more to the programs, Young said, but Jessamine County may have to consider adding a tuition base to the full-day program in the future if other funding options don’t pan out.

“The worst-case scenario would be not to have [full-day kindergarten] at all, and that’s really not an option — we’ve been striving so hard for doing that — so I’m looking at other possibilities,” Young said. “The most obvious one would be to make full-day kindergarten available for students who are eligible for free lunch because of their socioeconomic status and then make full-day kindergarten available to any other family with a 5-year-old on some kind of a sliding scale based on income, so they would pay their tuition portion, and that would only be the other half that the state doesn’t pay for.”

The model that includes tuition is not ideal, Young said, despite the availability of full-day kindergarten to poorer families.

“You begin to make a conscious decision that there are other kids that are not going to get that same benefit, so for us, the most magnanimous stance is that all children can benefit from a quality, full-day kindergarten program, which is what we offer at the Village,” Young said, “so I want every child in Jessamine County to have access to that, hopefully at no cost.”

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