By Jamon Smith, Tuscaloosa News
Read on tuscaloosanews.com.
The Tuscaloosa City School System has been approved to receive a $190,000 First Class Pre-K Intervention Grant from the Alabama Office of School Readiness.
The grant will aid the system in its goal of providing high-quality preschool education for all students eligible for pre-K classes, according to a city schools news release.
“Our district recognizes the importance of high-quality preschool education to the future success of our students,” said Superintendent Paul McKendrick. “We continually seek opportunities to expand our preschool services as we endeavor to serve as many students as possible.
“This funding enables our district to continue to expand high-quality preschool education services to those students most at risk for academic challenges,” he said. “This increased funding ensures our pre-school children receive access to the long-term benefits of pre-kindergarten education.”
The grant money will be used to build the pre-K programs at Skyland and Martin Luther King Jr. elementary schools during the next year with $100,000 of the grant award going to MLK and $90,000 going to Skyland.
The system now provides pre-K for 320 students in 20 classrooms at nine of its 13 elementary schools, said spokeswoman Lesley Bruinton. That’s about 50 percent of all the system’s students who are eligible to be enrolled in pre-K. The elementary schools in the system that don’t have pre-K programs are Verner, Southview and Rocky Quarry.
“The reason those three don’t have a pre-K program is that there’s no classroom space available,” Bruinton said earlier this year. “For the students who live in those residential zones who wish to take advantage of our pre-K program, there’s pre-K classes available to them at close-by schools where the facility space is available.”
Allison de la Torre, executive director of the Alabama School Readiness Alliance, said First Class Pre-K is an Alabama-funded program that has ranked as the No. 1 state-funded pre-K program in the country for the past seven years, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.
“States have been growing pre-K in the past few years because of all the research that has emerged showing the critical importance of children starting school earlier,” de la Torre said this summer. “Even though our program has been recognized for quality, it only approximately serves about 10 percent of pre-K-aged students in the state.
“We’re pushing for the full funding of pre-K within the next decade,” she said. “This year was the first year of that campaign and, with the leadership of the governor and the state Legislature, we were able to secure an additional $9.4 million in state investments, which brings the total to $28.5 million.”
Jeana Ross, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Children’s Affairs, said during the summer that the Tuscaloosa City Schools didn’t initially apply for the First Class Pre-K Grant by the May deadline. But the system was still able to receive a grant award because of the First Class Pre-K Intervention Grant program, which was specifically created for high-poverty schools that didn’t apply for a First Class Pre-K Grant.
She said about $2 million of the First Class money was set aside for the intervention grants.
McKendrick said the system didn’t initially apply for a First Class grant because officials were unaware that some of the grant’s requirements changed from last year and they thought the system was ineligible based on the previous year’s requirements.
“We didn’t qualify last year, so we weren’t looking for it,” McKendrick said this summer. “You cannot apply if you have less than 10 percent of your students eligible for pre-K. Since we have some state- and locally funded pre-K programs, we were over the 10 percent. We wouldn’t have qualified last year. This year that changed, and they applied that percentage to the entire county, which caused us to decrease to 4 percent because you’re looking at students all across the city and the county.”
According to the news release, Rep. Bill Poole, who is chairman of the Alabama House Ways and Means Education Committee, was instrumental in helping Tuscaloosa City Schools secure the intervention grant.
“I am excited about the opportunity to establish an additional First Class Pre-K classroom in our community through this grant,” Poole said. “This classroom will be an asset to our children and our community.”
Poole said Tuscaloosa has been a leader in the area of pre-K education.
