"A system that was built to be universal is not," preschool director says about Colorado's newly launched program
For thousands of Colorado families, the promise of "preschool for all" was a welcome one.
"I wanted to be able to not feel such a weight giving her what I want to give her and it's so helpful in the household and when you have multiple children ... very necessary," Moriah Lerma said.
Lerma is a teacher in the Mapleton School District, she sees the benefits of early education both in the classroom and at home.
"There's a huge shift coming to school when you have never been to school," she said.
Her 4-year-old is enrolled in Mapleton's preschool program.
Last year the district served more than 500 children. It's a number their Early Childhood Director, Kristen Morel, thought would grow with the launch of Universal Pre-K.
"We have definitely not gone up. We are about 100 students, 110 students shy of the seats we have available to serve and that's assuming that everyone who accepted since July is actually going to show up," she said.
Morel says families she has been able to contact struggle to understand the application.
Without access to the system the state is using she and her and staff must rely on information that is shared with them, which has been slow coming in and often incomplete.
"Where they wanted to attend, which of our seven sites, whether they are looking for full day or half day or a.m. or p.m.," Morel added.
Her fear is not that those students ended up somewhere else, it's that families who would benefit the most from the program felt defeated and may have opted out altogether.
"This is not about making money. The students that I've spent 20 years of my life fighting for, the ones that aren't going to get preschool if it's not paid for by the state are actually the ones that are being exited out of this," Morel said. "So unfortunately a system that was built to be universal is not."
