Popular pre-K class with a waitlist gets Pierce Co. kids outside. Its funding is at risk
Childcare options were slim for Jayme Croff and her family when they moved to the Gig Harbor area about three years ago.
“It was either a two-year waitlist or part-time co-op,” Croff, who works as the assistant director of student services at the Peninsula School District, said. Croff and her husband both work full-time and many preschool options were already full.
That’s when they found the Peninsula School District’s Transitional Kindergarten program. They enrolled their son in November 2022 when a spot opened up at Voyager Elementary, which also has an outdoor classroom component — another bonus that Croff had been searching for.
Now, he talks about nature, wants to garden with his mom and isn’t afraid to get dirty, Croff said. She describes him as “a curious little learner” and credits his Transitional Kindergarten program with stoking his wonder.
“If we had this in every school, it would be a game-changer for our community,” Croff said.
The district’s Transitional Kindergarten program, launched in January 2022, is one of many in the state that could be impacted by a funding gap at the state level.
What is transitional kindergarten and how is it funded in Washington state?
Transitional kindergarten is what it sounds like — a transition to kindergarten. It’s a program for children at least 4 years old by Aug. 31 who could use an extra boost before kindergarten, according to the Washington Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In 2023, the state Legislature passed House Bill 1550 to rename and codify existing transitional kindergarten programs in Washington state under a new statewide “Transition to Kindergarten” (TK) program, administered by OSPI. It also declared that TK doesn’t fall under “basic education,” the umbrella term for the minimum educational services that children need to graduate from public school in Washington state. The state is legally bound by the state constitution to fully fund basic education.
Instead, TK is funded through a separate state budget allocation. The sum is distributed across school districts based on their enrollment numbers, using a formula outlined in state law.
During the 2022-2023 school year, 5,244 children in Washington state participated in a TK program, an increase of 2,117 children from the year before, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. Total state spending on the program was about $69.5 million, or about $13,259 per child enrolled. Combined with reported local and federal contributions, districts in Washington state spent a total of about $17,900 per TK student in the 2022-2023 school year.
In the Peninsula School District, children are eligible to participate in the Transitional Kindergarten program if they haven’t participated in any other early learning programs. Kids who show needs academically, in their social/emotional or language development, or in their motor skills, qualify for TK, as do those who aren’t able to afford or access licensed preschool, those who qualify for free or reduced-cost meals and those whose first language isn’t English, according to the district website.
Lisa Reaugh, the district’s executive director of Student Services, said the screening process for TK works as follows: First, families complete an interest survey for the district’s early learning programs, where they can share more about their financial and home situation. Families interested in Transitional Kindergarten are invited to bring their children to a screening session where teachers observe the children’s behavior, including how they interact with others and complete activities, and score them with a rubric.
Taking into account information from families, including whether their kids speak another language at home, the district starts with kids who have the lowest scores and enroll students until the program spots are filled, she said.
Data shows the program is working
“On average, students who attend TK meet or exceed the Kindergarten Readiness objectives as measured by WaKIDS,” Reaugh wrote in an email. “We see particularly strong TK outcomes in the area of literacy and social emotional learning (problem solving and independence).”
WaKIDS is a kindergarten readiness assessment that teachers administer at the beginning of the school year. Teachers observe kindergarteners’ proficiency in six domains — cognitive, language, literacy, mathematics, physical, and social-emotional, according to OSPI.
Reaugh explained in a Jan. 10 interview with district Director of Research and Assessment, James Cantonwine, that the district color-codes each child’s level of development using a system from their WaKIDS assessment tool, TeachingStrategies GOLD.
Each color corresponds to the level of development one would expect to see in a child of a certain age. Purple roughly corresponds to the development level of a 5-year-old, right around the age of most kindergarteners. Blue roughly corresponds to the development level of a 4-year-old.
To be considered “kindergarten-ready,” a child generally has some results coded as purple and some blue, Cantonwine said.
Data from the 2024 WaKIDS assessment, which the district administered for their approximately 600 kindergarteners, 108 of whom attended TK the previous year, shows in several areas that “more kids are further along the development continuum because they participated in TK,” Reaugh said.
A graph she shared showed that 90.5% of students who attended TK met the purple standard in literacy, compared to 80.8% of those who didn’t. Taken together with students in the blue category, 99.5% of students who attended TK were considered “kindergarten-ready” in literacy, compared to 96% of students who didn’t attend TK, she explained.
Those might seem like small differences, but she said it’s important to note that the children accepted into TK were generally selected because they exhibited some need upon entry. Their performance on WaKIDS suggests they were able to make gains despite their starting point.
OSPI data also found that TK helps close opportunity gaps across the state: former TK students who began kindergarten in the fall of 2022 did better in all six WaKIDS domains than their peers who didn’t. A separate OSPI study of third graders also found that students who were “kindergarten-ready” on their 2015-2016 WAKIDS assessment were over 1.5 times more likely to meet state standards in English language arts and math on their 2018-2019 third grade Smarter Balanced Assessments than those who weren’t.
The Peninsula School District’s TK program is currently offered at five schools in the district and has 108 spots. There are about 45 students on the waitlist this school year, according to Reaugh. About 300 families filled out a survey indicating their interest in one or more of the district’s early childhood education offerings, which also include the Early Childhood Education and Assistance Program (ECEAP) (for qualifying families based on income or other significant needs) and a part-day preschool program for children who qualify for special education.
Natalie Wimberley, the district’s school board president, said the board’s vision is to grow their Transitional Kindergarten program, especially to fill the gap in affordable preschool offerings in the area.
“We have the capability,” Wimberley said. “We just need the funding for it.”
State funding for TK
The state faces a projected funding gap of about $21 million for the TK program, according to a 2025 supplemental OSPI budget request.
For a brief explanation of how state budgets work, from the Washington State Fiscal Information website: the state develops two main kinds of budgets. The biennial budget establishes funding amounts for state agencies — such as those in public education, social services and transportation — over a period of two years. The process of developing the budget begins with state agencies requesting money. The governor looks at those requests and develops a proposed budget, then passes it to the state Legislature for review. The Legislature debates and completes their own version of the budget, and sends it to the Governor’s desk to be signed into law (or vetoed, or partially vetoed).
It works the same way for supplemental budgets, except those propose adjustments to previous or current biennial budgets. The state creates both biennial and supplemental budgets in odd-numbered years, but only supplemental budgets in even-numbered years. This year, they’ll pass both.
For the state’s fiscal year 2025, which runs from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025, about $69.7 million has been approved in the existing biennial budget to fund the TK program. That’s supposed to be enough to pay for 5,665 students, according to OSPI’s supplemental budget request.
But schools actually need about $21 million more than that because of an unexpected boost in TK enrollment numbers, the request said. At the time of OSPI’s request, the headcount was projected to hit 8,034 students — over 2,000 students more than what was budgeted for. The additional $21 million would bring the total state allocation for TK to about $90.6 million.
“If funds are not provided to support the students currently enrolled in the program, school districts may have to make mid-year cuts to the program which will negatively impact students, families, and educators across the state,” OSPI’s budget request said.
As of Dec. 1, 2024, actual TK enrollment stands at 7,376 students, OSPI spokesperson Katy Payne told The News Tribune via email.
Asked why there’s such a large discrepancy between enrollment predictions and actual numbers, Payne wrote it resulted from a burst of new or expanded TK classes in the 2024-2025 school year across about 40 school districts, including two large districts.
She told The News Tribune that the Caseload Forecast Council estimates TK enrollment in the same way they predict enrollment numbers for K-12 students. The council is the designated body that forecasts how many people will use different government services. Those figures affect how much funding the state allocates for these services in the biennial budget, according to the council website.
Gov. Jay Inslee’s proposed supplemental budget includes the full $21 million sum requested by OSPI for TK, according to the Washington State Fiscal Information site. Now, it’s up to the state Legislature whether or not to support that adjustment in their version of the supplemental budget that they’ll develop over the legislative session, which begins Jan. 13.
If the Legislature doesn’t allocate this funding, school districts may need to dip into their own local funds to make up the difference, taking away funding from other programs and services and making it difficult for districts to plan and staff their TK programs effectively, Payne wrote in her email.
According to Reaugh, the Peninsula School District currently receives enough funds to pay for a teacher and a paraeducator in each of its TK classrooms. The district would need to decide whether or not to use levy funds to support the program, if some of their state funding falls through.
The state budget faces a $10 billion to $12 billion shortfall over the next four years because of various factors including declining consumer spending and home sales, and increased demand for social services, education and other public programs, according to the Washington State Standard.
