Parents’ Preschool Pathways Probed

Canvassers will knock on doors in four neighborhoods this spring to find out why parents haven’t been signing their kids up for preschool — while slots remain open.

The New Haven Early Childhood Council said at its Wednesday night meeting that it has received a $27,000 grant to fund the effort.

It’s trying to reverse recent under-enrollment that has left spots open in the city’s School Readiness and Head Start programs, even though advocates estimate that at least 1,960 kids under age 5 in New Haven don’t have access to quality programs.

With a bilingual consultant, the canvassers plan to fan out in Newhallville, Dixwell, Dwight and the Hill — four neighborhoods that don’t have many fully subsidized preschool slots, said Randi McCray, a consultant for the council.

“We can really do some door-to-door knocking to find out where these kids are,” said Rev. Boise Kimber, the council’s co-chair, who hosted the meeting at his Dixwell Avenue church, First Calvary Baptist.

According to data collected by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the percentage of New Haven’s kindergarteners who went to pre-kindergarten has been plummeting. It dropped from a high of 71.5 percent in 2010 to a low of 54.0 percent in 2015.

(The rates at the city’s charter schools were all higher: 91.3 percent at Elm City Montessori, 89.7 percent at Booker T. Washington Academy, 85.2 percent at Elm City College Preparatory, and 75.3 percent at Amistad Academy.)

The New Haven Early Childhood Council commissioned a survey at the time to find out what was going on. It sent a questionnaire to every parent whose child hadn’t had any formal education before kindergarten.

About one-quarter of parents said they’d just wanted to keep their kids at home. Many more reported that they couldn’t make the logistics of preschool work. About one-third of parents said they couldn’t afford it, and one-tenth said they didn’t have transportation.

With the new grant from the CT Early Childhood Funder Collaborative, which must be spent by June 30, neighborhood canvassers will try to understand what’s currently stopping families with kids under five years old from enrolling in preschool.

Several parents who came to the council meeting suggested the issues aren’t much different from five years ago, especially when it comes to finding a way to pay for preschool on top of rising housing costs.

“Unfortunately, I’m too rich to be poor, but I’m very poor to be rich,” one father said. ​“I can’t afford services, and my son can’t get childcare.”

They said the free preschool programs either have strict income eligibility levels that are too low, like Head Start. Or they fill up with out-of-town residents and don’t cover the full workday, like the inter-district magnet schools’ pre-kindergarten.

If parents can’t get into either of those, they can enroll in a School Readiness program, which charges a sliding-scale fee. Those programs are offered at five public schools and nearly two dozen private schools.

Keivonna Austin said that she couldn’t get her two girls into the same school. Her older daughter goes to L.W. Beecher Museum School, an inter-district magnet school in Beaver Hills that offers free Pre‑K from age 3 up.

But despite having a neighborhood and sibling preference in the school lottery, Austin said she couldn’t get her younger daughter in for the last two years. Instead, she sent her to Creative ME, a Westville daycare center.

That often creates a challenge at pick-up time, especially because the daycare center charges a $35 fine if she’s late, added Lisa McKnight, the children’s grandmother. The school district does not pay for transportation for its pre-kindergarteners, adding an extra hurdle for families who don’t have a car.

Even though the schools are only about five blocks apart on Blake Street, ​“one traffic jam” could do her in, McKnight said. ​“That, for a working parent, is like a double strike,” she said.

“We’re getting left out of a system, and it seems like it’s by design,” McKnight added, referring to the proportion of desks in inter-district magnet schools set aside for suburban residents.

Eliza Halsey, the executive director of Elm City Montessori School, a locally approved charter, pointed out that another piece of this ​“structural issue” is that families often don’t realize that they’ll have a harder time getting into an inter-district magnet school if they don’t nab a pre-kindergarten desk.

That could potentially disadvantage low-income families who opt for the free Head Start program at places like Dr. Reginald Mayo Early Childhood School — a problem that Board of Education member Tamiko Jackson-McArthur recently took up in her Governance Committee meeting.

Austin said the city should try to stagger its preschool programs’ start times, which would help out for parents like her who work the night shift that sometimes doesn’t end until 10 o’clock.

“As a Council, we have to raise these issues with [the Board of Education],” said Sherri Killins-Stewart, the other co-chair. ​“I’m concerned about people struggling of a certain income and race. I think there are ways to target this, ways to have them included.”