With thousands of slots still open, LAUSD opens up subsidized preschool to higher-income families

With thousands of spots in its subsidized preschools vacant, the Los Angeles Unified School District is opening up enrollment to higher-income families to fill spaces currently not being used by low-income families.

The district has more than 80 preschools for 2- to 4-year olds, known as early education centers, funded through the California State Preschool Program (CSPP). The state requires that providers prioritize students based on certain criteria, like income and living situation.

But since the pandemic and the growth of transitional kindergarten for 4-year-olds, the district has been under capacity at its preschools, said Dean Tagawa, who directs LAUSD’s Early Childhood Education Division. They’ve been at around 70% full — equivalent to about 3,000 open spots. Now, the district is seeking families regardless of income.

“This idea of being able to expand to reach other families that may not have qualified in the past is pretty exciting — to be able to get more families in and be able to provide more services,” Tagawa said.

The move essentially makes preschool more universal in the largest school district in the state, and could save families who have been just above the historical cutoff thousands of dollars. But it’s also an outlier among preschools that contract with the state in a program aimed at serving low-income families, based on LAist interviews with county and early childhood experts.

Expanding eligibility

On a sunny morning at Glassell Park Early Education Center, groups of toddlers play outside in the nature-based learning space. Some are digging mud with toy trucks, others play in a sandbox. One curly-haired toddler decides to get a taste, and shoves a fistful of sand into their mouth. Inside the classrooms, children learn about numbers and letters through play-based activities.

The Glassell Park Early Education Center's nature-inspired outdoor play space.

(

Elly Yu

/

LAist

)

Tagawa said recent changes to state guidelines mean that districts now have a way to enroll students from any family, regardless of income, to pre-schools like this.

“So whether you're very wealthy, or you're middle-class or you're at that kind of cusp where you wouldn't have been income-eligible before, you are now — and you pay a very nominal fee to go to these programs,” he said at a September school board meeting. “That is a huge change, but it goes fully in line with making sure every child in California has an opportunity to go in an early education program.”

Under the change, families could save a lot of money: A family of four who makes over half a million a year could pay less than $400 a month to send their child to an LAUSD preschool, for instance. A family of four with an annual income of about $144,000 would pay around $93 a month.

Nick Melvoin, an LAUSD school board member, said many of his constituents were previously just above the income threshold to qualify for the early education centers, but at the same time, haven't been able to afford private preschools, which can run upward of $2,000 a month.

“The pitch to parents is… please send your kid. It’s really $400 a month versus $2,000 to $3,000 a month,” Melvoin said.

How the state prioritizes enrollment

The California Department of Education contracts with over 600 school districts and other agencies like nonprofits to run the California State Preschool Program, which was founded in 1965 to serve low-income families not eligible for federal Head Start.

State law lays out who is eligible for enrollment, and directives from the California Department of Education further flesh out the order for how providers should prioritize families. Examples of priorities include children in families at or below state median income (about $105,482 for a family of three); or who receive certain kinds of aid; or who are at risk of being neglected, abused, or exploited; or who have special needs.

Once all the state’s priority groups have been met, it allows school districts to enroll children regardless of their family’s income.

“If we were at capacity with all lower-income and then identified-need [students], we wouldn't have any space to do this,” Tagawa said.

He added that they’ll set aside 5% of slots for priority families who end up wanting to enroll.

Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild CA, which provides technical assistance to subsidized early care and education programs, said she was surprised to hear that LAUSD had enrolled eligible students from all the other priority categories.

An analysis by the California Budget & Policy Center found that while enrollment at these state preschool programs has declined since the pandemic, it found only about 17% of eligible three and four-year-old children in the state were served in 2022.

“It is the only school district that I have heard of, to date, that is utilizing this provision which would allow any family to be enrolled, regardless of income,” Buthee said. “I know that there are issues around enrollment in CSPP, especially for school districts that have a pretty aggressive transitional kindergarten program.”

Tagawa said while districts have theoretically been able to enroll higher income families for several years, it wasn’t until the state made a recent revision to how families pay for subsidized preschool that LAUSD decided to expand its eligibility, beginning this fall.

While previously there was no uniformity to what rate they could charge families, the new guidance “gave us as a district a place to start from,” he said.

What are other districts doing?

LAUSD is by far the largest contractor of the California State Preschool Program, with 6,657 children enrolled as of October 2023. Other districts LAist spoke to have not opened enrollment to higher-income families.

A spokesperson for Huntington Beach City School District said they haven’t had families who meet higher-income requirements because families interested in their CSPP pre-school have solely been from families below the income threshold, or who have kids with other prioritized needs.

Long Beach Unified School District, the second biggest district in L.A. County, said they also haven’t enrolled beyond the income-eligibility requirements because they have a waiting list of families who are income-eligible.

Luis Bautista, executive director of the Los Angeles County Office of Education (LACOE) Head Start and Early Learning Division, said he also hadn’t heard of other districts opening up their enrollment.

The agency sub-contracts with eight districts and nonprofits in the county to enroll about 1,000 students, and is a little over 90% capacity, he said. Because their programs are also combined with the federal program Head Start, the income eligibility requirements are even lower than the state’s program.

“We're nowhere near enrolling families at that income ceiling level that the state allows for because we have to work with families that are earning much less,” he said. “I think the need is out there for sure.”