Parents to Go to Trenton to Argue for a Preschool
By DAMIEN CAVE, NY TIMES, August 9, 2004

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NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J., Aug. 5 - In May, dozens of factory workers and landscapers lined up outside a three-story concrete building here on Drift Street, snaking around the block to register their children for classes at a preschool run by the Puerto Rican Action Board, a private nonprofit group.

On Monday, many of them will gather at the State House in Trenton to try to keep their beloved school from closing. They plan to protest what they claim is a form of institutional bias. The New Jersey Department of Education, they argue, wants to eliminate the community-based, mostly nonprofit private preschool programs like the one that the Puerto Rican Action Board runs.

The group, which started offering preschool in 1973, maintains that the state is refusing to cover rising costs in violation of a 1998 state Supreme Court ruling mandating that 30 poor districts receive everything they need to create "well-planned, high-quality" preschools. Without the money, it says, it will have to close its three preschools here.

The Department of Education says the Puerto Rican Action Board receives plenty of money - about $9,700 for each of its 225 children, close to $1,000 more on average than the state's public preschools, and more than twice what public preschools receive in New York.

At the heart of the battle, however, lies a much larger debate about the role of private nonprofit agencies in a public system. The Puerto Rican Action Board and other social service agencies have been offering preschool for decades, and the court decision explicitly states that any school able to meet the court's education standard "should be supplied with the necessary funding to be able to do so."

Child advocates regularly praise the programs for quickly improving their standards in line with the court's rules - replacing amateur teachers, for instance, with certified professionals.

And yet now, despite the court's ruling, providers, education experts and parents say the state is trying to push agencies like the Puerto Rican Action Board aside. With limitations on construction and inflexible budgeting rules, they say, the state is essentially trying to remove the private preschools from the mix.

There are about 500 community-based preschools in the districts covered by the 1998 court decision, Abbott v. Burke, and they serve nearly 70 percent of New Jersey's poor 3- and 4-year-olds. The state gives the agencies that run the schools more than $250 million annually.

"The Department of Education simply does not want to lose control of this money," says Daniel Santo Pietro, executive director of the Hispanic Directors Association, a collective of Latino nonprofits, including the Puerto Rican Action Board. "They are worried about the public school system and maintaining it."

The Supreme Court's Abbott ruling centered on money as well: the court found that New Jersey's school funding system, based heavily on local property taxes, shortchanged children in poorer areas. To fix the problem as quickly as possible for preschoolers, the court made room for existing private programs.

According to some providers, parents and education experts, New Jersey education officials have yet to accept the prominent role of these private agencies. Public school administrators have generally seen the agencies as offering "child care and not much else," said Cynthia Rice, a senior policy analyst at the Association for Children of New Jersey, a nonpartisan child advocacy group.

Nowhere is the lack of respect more apparent, educators argue, than in the policy regarding building expansion and construction. Since the 1998 decision, the state has offered little guidance on how public school districts should handle private agencies' plans for growth. This year, new state regulations cut off private preschools' access to a $8.6 billion school construction fund that was set up in 2000.

Ellen Frede, assistant to the commissioner in the Education Department's Office of Early Childhood Education, said: "It's not in the state's interest to build buildings for private entities. That doesn't make sense."

Lawyers for the 30 Abbott districts, however, say that the state's actions reveal a lack of imagination. "It's very uncreative and very shortsighted," said Ellen Boylan, a lawyer at the Education Law Center, which represents public schools and private preschools in the poor districts. "They are not looking at the reality of where most of these kids are."

Parents also say that the state - which is building several preschools that will hold up to 500 children - has failed to recognize the advantage of small education programs.

Antonio Lara, 38, a factory worker in New Brunswick, is one of many parents who say their children prefer the preschools run by the nonprofits to the public schools. He said his son Daniel cried and refused to enter the public preschool where he was originally enrolled, but has settled in since coming to the Puerto Rican Action Board's school on Drift Street in New Brunswick. "They give him a lot more attention here," Mr. Lara said in Spanish at the end of a school day this week, as Daniel jumped around at the playground. "I hope to God that it will not close."

Other parents, like Jessica Gonzalez, 30, who attended the New Brunswick preschool in the 1970's, stress that agencies like the Puerto Rican Action Board often help families not just with early childhood education, but also with immigration issues, English classes and health care. "They're really part of the community," she said.

But survival is far from secure, said Lorraine Cooke, executive director of the Egenolf Early Childhood Center in Elizabeth. In fact, she sees a threat to her private preschool every time she looks out her office window. Only a driveway separates the Egenolf school, on Newark Avenue, from a row of condemned houses that will soon be replaced by a new public school, to serve preschoolers through 8th graders.

Dr. Cooke, who holds a Ph.D. in education, said she tried to buy the property next door, but the owner refused to sell. When the state seized the lot through eminent domain, Dr. Cooke decided to borrow $2.2 million to double the size of her school, which has been housed since 1973 in a brick two-story former office building.

She said she was expanding to compete, and because she was tired of waiting for the state to help Egenolf, which has been offering preschool in Elizabeth since 1890. Nonetheless, the prospect of such a large loan scares her. "I lose sleep at night trying to figure out if there are enough grants to keep the center going," Dr. Cooke said.

The Puerto Rican Action Board built its three-story, 19,000-square foot preschool building on Drift Street for $2.7 million in 1999. The agency raised most of the money through grants and private funding, but the mortgage payments still cost about $206,000 a year. The state will cover about 75 percent of that this year, according to Jose Figueroa, the agency's fiscal manager, which is an improvement over the year before. But, he said, it is still not enough.

The mortgage expenses and the allotment for benefits and administrative costs has created the prospect of a $400,000 deficit for the next fiscal year, Mr. Figueroa said, but the problem is not just financial. For example, the state refuses to allow a preschool's savings in some areas to pay for services the state does not cover, like the cost of a head teacher or a grant writer. So while health care costs come in under budget for the teachers, who are mostly young and single, and over budget for support workers, there is no way to balance spending.

Dr. Cooke said financing for school supplies was also problematic. The state gives Egenolf $7.75 per student, which is enough for a 1,000-student district that can buy in bulk" and thus qualify for group discounts, Dr. Cooke said. "But we have 100 kids." The supply money, she said, barely pays for "a month's worth of paper that we have to send to the district for reports."

Dr. Cooke, who heads an association of 400 private program directors in New Jersey, admitted that some of her frustration came from dealing for the first time with public school bureaucracy. Before Abbott, preschools like Egenolf received funding in lump sums from the State Department of Human Services. "The funding was significantly less than it is now, but it was much easier to spend it wisely," Dr. Cooke says.

The state, however, shows no sign of budging. "For the most part, this is working," Ms. Frede said. "People don't like restrictions - I get that - but there are going to be restrictions when you accept public money. They have to live with it."



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