Current PFA policy provides all families with these options for their preschooler:
- full day/ full year - year round care for up to 10 hours per day, 5 days a week.
- School day/ school year - 9 months of care for 6 hours per day, 5 days a week.
There are significant benefits for offering free full year, full day Preschool For All:
- Free expanded day preschool increases parent earnings by 22%.1
- Administrative ease reduces implementation costs, pressure on providers, and speeds up application processing.2
- Every dollar spent on free preschool yields between $3 and $20 of benefits.3
Implementing PFA ballot measure policy to limit full day/full year to families under the self sufficiency threshold (400% FPL / $128,600 per yr for families of four4) and limiting families over 400% FPL to school year/school day has multiple drawbacks. In addition, the small cost saving doesn’t justify the concerns.
Implementing a limitation on full year/ full day care comes with many drawbacks:5
- Means-testing costs: $2.8m ongoing and an unknown cost to update software.
- 6-8 week increased application processing time.
- Net revenue is only $1.7m a year.
Means-testing creates barriers and fairness concerns:
- While means-testing may seem fair by targeting services to those under self-sufficiency level, it ironically makes benefits harder to access for those families.6
- Families above the self-sufficiency level (400% FPL) still struggle to afford preschool, which exceeds the federal standard of 7% household income.7
- Means-testing will limit PFA benefits for families paying the PFA tax.8
Parents' Earnings and the Returns to Universal Pre-Kindergarten
Universal Pre-K as Economic Stimulus: Evidence from Nine States and Cities
How increasing administrative burdens and means testing in the US safety-net punishes the poor
Households With 2 Kids Need to Earn Average of $402,708 to Comfortably Afford Child Care