At her State of Education address in November, Washoe County School District superintendent Susan Enfield walked attendees through the district’s ambitious goals for improvement over the next three years. One is to have 75 percent of students proficient in English language arts and math by third grade.
That would mean proficiency bumps of over 30 percent in both subjects. WCSD hasn’t seen more than two percent positive year-to-year change in either third grade subject over any of the past six school years.
In WCSD’s strategic plan, one of the ways the district thinks it can realize that growth is by supporting early learning and pre-K programs countywide and help them serve more children with higher-quality education.
For Enfield, it’s about helping all students succeed in acquiring those basic skills and performing well in school.
“The stronger start we can give our students, the less likely that those gaps, those learning gaps are going to start to begin with,” she said in an interview with KUNR. “So, rather than talking about closing gaps, let’s talk about preventing gaps in the first place.”
In pre-K, students get opportunities to build crucial verbal and socio-emotional skills that are foundational to successful classroom learning. Those short-term outcomes help them excel in their early years of formal education.
High-quality early education programs allow students to explore topics they find interesting and learn how to be in community with others, both adults and peers.
Those benefits can help all students, especially low-income ones, excel in school and life further down the line, said Andres Bustamante, assistant professor of human development at UC Irvine. He studies the medium- and long-term effects of enrolling in early education programs and how those effects can help students from low-income families reach the same heights as their higher-income peers.
“What we see in this data is that access to sustained and high-quality early childhood education is a difference maker in terms of leveling the playing field,” he said.
Bustamante was the lead author of a study published this year in the journal Developmental Psychology that investigated how access to high-quality early education affected those students’ achievement in science, technology, engineering, and math in later elementary years and at age 15. He found that attending high-quality programs that encourage cognitive stimulation and provide a healthy, caring environment is a strong predictor of more robust STEM skill acquisition and better STEM class performance at both the late elementary and early high school levels.
Bustamante theorizes that, because high-quality early education environments often mirror STEM classrooms in their focus on inquiry and problem solving, students are able to obtain those skills more quickly than their peers. Then, they can build on them through the rest of their academic careers.
While the dataset for the study was very large and relatively diverse, it was collected in the ‘90s and 2000s and participants were not randomly assigned to different early education settings. So, there may be some limitations with the study.
However, Bustamante shared that this article is a part of a strong chorus of early education studies that link high-quality early education with significant long-term positive outcomes.
That’s a view that Enfield and Patti Oya, the director of Nevada’s Office of Early Learning and Development, share. But industry issues like high costs for parents, few available spots in programs, high early educator turnover, and reverberating financial effects from the pandemic for providers still exist. Those barriers mean that there are only enough childcare seats, let alone ones in pre-K or other early education programs, for 35 percent of Nevada’s kids under 5 with both parents working.
For Oya, the dream is to have voluntary pre-K available to all students and families in the state.
“To have that kind of access and two years of pre-K before they go into kindergarten would be ideal,” she said. “And then, you don’t look at eligibility, income eligibility, just anyone who needs and wants that, I would say is our biggest goal.”
Oya and the state have been working towards that goal. This year, the state funded over 2,600 seats for four-year-olds whose families make less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line, or about $60,000 for a family of four. Oya’s office also received additional funding from the 2023 Nevada State Legislature to roll out another pre-K program that focuses on literacy and raises the eligibility ceiling to 250 percent of the poverty line.
Oya said her office has now started modeling the costs of adding further seats in advance of the 2025 legislative session in hopes that legislators will approve more state-funded seats in Nevada.
Jose Davila IV is a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.
