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The difference between the governor's words and his budget
Published on Wednesday, Apr 01, 2009
His budget creates the Center for Early Childhood Development and an Early Childhood Financing Workgroup in an effort to streamline all state-funded programs and financing in a single administrative structure. An initiative to create a coordinated and effective early childhood system in Ohio is long overdue. Strickland rightly seeks to bring sharper focus to the state's early childhood services.
For all that, Strickland's budget also leads to an uneasy sense that the governor talks a much better game than he delivers. The money does not go where he says the priorities are.
Case in point: the Early Learning Initiative, a program that subsidizes preschool and child care for low-income working families. The program currently serves 12,000 preschoolers, the budget of $125 million a year coming from the state's federal block grant for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. With demand for TANF funds growing rapidly, Strickland proposes to eliminate TANF funding for ELI, which is not a mandated service, and support it with $85 million in state funds. The lower funding level would be enough to cover a mere 8,000 slots.
If investing in early childhood programs is the ''most efficient economic development strategy available,'' why does the governor's budget proposal shrink, rather than expand, a program such as the Early Learning Initiative? Indeed, the goal to turn Ohio into an education and economic powerhouse argues for a public preschool program that gives middle-income families ready access to high quality early education. The economic returns on a solid early foundation are well-documented.
GroundWork, a child advocacy organization, notes that Ohio lags far behind several states in this regard. Georgia's universal preschool program for 4-year-olds, for instance, serves 70,000 children. How much of a priority, really, is early learning in Ohio?
Get the full article here.
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