Multnomah County’s Preschool For All program has overshot its goals in each of its first three years, and this year is no exception. The county’s coal was to support 3,000 slots, but it expects to have capacity for 3,800 3 and 4-year-olds in the 2025-2026 school year. Still, that number is far below demand, with nearly double the amount of applications filed every year than there are slots available. Backers hope capacity will be sufficient by 2030, when the county aims to offer 11,000 slots and meet its goal of universal access.
County voters approved the Preschool For All ballot measure in 2020 and the program opened in the 2022-23 school year. The preschool effort is funded by a 1.5% marginal tax on earnings of more than $150,000 per year for an individual and over $200,000 for households.
Leslee Barnes, director of the Preschool and Early Learning Division at Multnomah County, and Patrick Earnest, director of the St. James Child Development Center, join us to talk about the program.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Multnomah County’s Preschool For All program announced this week that it has exceeded its annual goal. The county’s target for the coming school year was 3,000 free publicly-funded slots. Instead, it expects to have capacity for close to 4,000 3 and 4-year-olds. Still, that number is likely to be far below demand. In recent years there have been about twice as many applications as available spots.
Leslee Barnes is the director of the Preschool and Early Learning Division at Multnomah County. Patrick Earnest is the director of the St. James Child Development Center. He runs one of the preschools that is taking part in this program. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Leslee Barnes: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Leslee, first, so applications for those 3,800 spots just opened about a week ago. What has demand been like so far?
Barnes: Well, as of Monday, we had 1,300 applications in the queue and so wildly popular again this year, and then probably going to exceed what we have to offer also.
Miller: Are you expecting… I mentioned in previous years, twice as many applications, so you’re thinking about maybe 7 or 8,000 kids asking for spots, or their parents?
Barnes: I mean, we’ll see. We’re on track and see similar numbers to what we saw last year.
Miller: The county’s ultimate goal here, what it defines as universal preschool, is 11,000 Preschool For All spots.Where did that number come from?
Barnes: So basically we know that we have about around 13 to 14,000, 3 and 4-year-olds, and we expect that 80% of them will want a publicly funded preschool slot and that’s where we get the 11,000 number.
Miller: And then Head Start or other existing spots would make up the difference? That’s how you get to the 80.
Barnes: Yeah, so we’re not including that in 11,000. That’s in addition to and so yes, those federally funded programs are included in the universal model.
Miller: Patrick, what was the history of your preschool before you recently joined Preschool For All?
Patrick Earnest: Yes, so we have been providing care in downtown Portland since 1981. Historically, we serve families that are working downtown, and it was all a private pay model before PFA.
Miller: Why did you seek out participation in this?
Earnest: The benefits for families was huge and I wanted to see a more sustainable model financially, so I now have guaranteed funds coming in for those PFA seats.
Miller: So, was there a question for you about whether you could continue to operate if you had to rely on families paying out of their own pocket for your services?
Earnest: Yes. So, post-pandemic, it was a pretty scary time. Childcare was broken and it just wasn’t sustainable. So, we were missing the mark financially up until we started receiving PFA funds.
Miller: Is that largely due to where you are ‒ that a lot of your parents, they worked downtown and so they would drop their kids off close to where they worked? But if they were working downtown in lower numbers, they were seeking privately paid preschool closer to where they lived?
Earnest: Correct. So when we left ‒ we closed during the pandemic ‒ and when we left, we had 140 children enrolled. When we reopened several months later, 8 children showed up. So, it was a very scary time.
Miller: But then having it be free for parents changes the equation.
Earnest: Yes, absolutely.
Miller: What kinds of hoops ‒ maybe is the wrong word to use here ‒ but how did you have to change your operation in order to actually qualify for this program?
Earnest: So, I didn’t have to change a lot. The only thing was extending our hours so that we’re providing care for 10 hours a day. But for the most part, everything is just business as usual.
Miller: Business, but I thought that if you’re taking part in this program, you don’t have control over the application or enrollment process, that you have to pay a certain amount in wages. Does it not change the way you operate a little bit?
Earnest: No. Yeah, I like that the application and enrollment process is taken away from me.
Miller: Oh yes, for you that’s a benefit, not a drawback.
Earnest: Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Miller: You say ‘we’re open’, the county says, ‘okay, here are your people’ and you don’t actually have to do the work to figure out who’s going to be coming.
Earnest: Correct.
Miller: Leslee, there was a recent audit that did express some concerns about your ability to add ‒ I don’t know, I can’t do the math quickly on the fly ‒ but 7,000 or so slots in the next six or so years given that, as they put it, many existing preschool providers in the county have not yet applied or have not qualified. What do you see as the challenges of keeping this graph going all the way up to 11,000 spots in the next six years?
Barnes: Yeah, I think the auditor pointed to a risk if we have a large number of providers that don’t want to join, we would not reach universe, but that has really hasn’t been the case. There were a few providers that said they were concerned about some of the contract language. We were able to talk to the county attorney and contract and see where there are places that we could modify that. And I’d say, the majority of our providers do sign up.
So I think we’re continuing to listen to where those pain points are, and the places where we can adjust we’re doing that. But we are on track. We’re more than a third of the way there and as you saw from our numbers, we’re still moving forward. So I don’t feel the same risk and concern that the auditor posed, but I think we’re going to make sure we watch those things that she named and make sure we’re checking in with providers because we do need them. This is a partnership.
Miller: What were some of the specific concerns that they had that you were able to find some wiggle room for?
Barnes: Right. There were things like, for example, providers are used to doing things like charging late fees and we had a policy that said families had to be completely free, and we heard feedback that there were some families coming very late and so that wasn’t part of their budget. And so we made a change and said, ‘hey, if that is happening, that is outside of our purview of hours and if you need to ‒ if that is your policy to charge a fee ‒ you can do that.’ So that was one of the changes. Another one was there was something about intellectual property that the county had as boilerplate language and we had to say, ‘hey, we’re not looking to take your curriculum that you created.’ So we do have space to individualize those contracts where need be.
Miller: I want to go through a couple other points that the auditor brought up. The program is supposed to prioritize children from families that are dealing with a variety of issues, including low income, being homeless, having disabilities or developmental delays, speaking English as a second language. But over the last three years, the percentage of applications from, offers to, and enrollments of kids from families who are in at least one of these priority groups, they’ve all gone down. How do you explain that? It’s a weird trend.
Barnes: It is, but it has really a fairly simple explanation. So this past year we’ve enrolled very large centers like Patrick’s, for example, and those families that are involved, that are enrolled there, automatically get enrollment, right? And so if those families are already able to pay or they already are outside of those demographics, we are not… they could skew those numbers for us.
Miller: Meaning you’re not saying to Patrick, you have to kick out your existing families if they don’t...
Barnes: If they don’t meet the priority.
Miller: So, but how is that… Okay, that makes sense as an explanation. But I should say that this is a trend over three years. You’re saying that that explains this for the last three years. What about going forward? I mean, the real, I think that the most important public policy question here is, if the richest Multnomah County residents are being forced in their taxes to pay for this, that’s how this works, I imagine they’re saying, ‘okay, fine, I’m for this ‒ or I’m not, I’m going to move to Clark County, but that’s a separate question. ‒ But if I’m going to do this, I want the people who need this the most to be taking advantage of it.’ So, what would you say to them?
Barnes: That is correct. So I think you also heard in the media, possibly, that there was some concern from providers about our continuity of care policy. And so that guarantee that you get that slot in the first year does not follow you in subsequent years. And so that means that you then have to decide as a provider how many seats are going to be offered to the public. And we have actually a rubric that we attach to the new seats, so it might look like 50% of the existing families that you have get guaranteed, but you have to open the other 50% to the public. So that’s how we’ll make sure that those families that aren’t already there and can afford to pay get allowed into preschool for all.
Miller: I want to turn to a spending question. This same audit said that you only spent about a third of what had been budgeted for coaching and workforce development programs in 2024, and that over three years, the program underspent its budget by a total of $67 million. There are some echoes here of the way that the county kind of got dinged a couple of years ago for not spending homeless money as quickly as Metro was hoping it would be spent. That’s a separate issue, but it did come to mind with a lot of money coming in and then not all of it going out the door. What are you doing to change that?
Barnes: Right. So I think the public should know that we are building a brand new system. So for example, we estimate our first year ‒ based on our previous data ‒ of how much money we would need to invest in the workforce or how many people out there could actually provide those services, and then we put a procurement out. That person, those folks apply for that. They also then have to hire their staff. So it’s just kind of a lag of time when the service comes about, but we’ve really tightened that up over the past year. We have data on how much we need to put in each pot. But the thing we alo [do] that is different than other county funds, is we don’t lose our money if we don’t use it for the fiscal year. It rolls back into the next budget. So we have the opportunity to then adjust that. And that money that you’re talking about too, that’s the big pot of money, those are our dedicated savings for the future. So it’s not that we’re not looking to spend that down. It’s what we thought we would use for the current year.
Miller: Right, but what can you tell county residents about plans to actually spend more of this money faster to get more of these slots open?
Barnes: Right. So, I mean, it really is about how many providers want to sign up at any given time, how many slots they’re willing to offer. Also our facilities investments, we have to actually create a lot of new slots too. So those buildings have to be built. We have to… and there’s a lot of processes that go in place, but we’re seeing a ramp up. I think we’re all, we’re on target, still. So, I think I’m not concerned as much about that as that we really have an intentional timeline and we’ve shown what we knew we would have to invest in, and that’s really on track.
Miller: Patrick, another policy that, as I understand it, schools who take part in Preschool For All have to follow is a no expulsion policy. What does that mean in practice if there’s a student who, say, is being very disruptive or potentially acting out in a way that could harm fellow students? I mean, what options do you have?
Earnest: So when I initially heard about that, I had some concerns, because what do I do? But…
Miller: It does happen.
Earnest: It does happen. It has not happened with me in quite some time, but the thing that was really attractive to me about Preschool For All is that we are fully supported, and we have an inclusion team that can come in and help all of our staff just support and make sure that the child is not going to be suspended.
Miller: An inclusion, meaning and that’s somebody who you pay, or that’s some that’s somebody who comes from the county?
Earnest: Yes. Preschool For All staff.
Barnes: We have an inclusion team. We heard loud and clear that a lot of providers have had a lot of children with behaviors or have exceptional needs and as we’re saying, you have to take the children that we send you, we heard that they were very concerned about having an overwhelmed amount of children in their care. And so we have an inclusion team that coaches and supports what’s going on at the center and connects to other community resources. We also add an inclusion fund, which means that a classroom like Patrick that has children, maybe more than four with a service plan, gets another staff person. So their ratio is actually lowered with those investments.
Miller: I want to go back to that sort of off the cuff comment I mentioned earlier about high income people going to Clark County. I’m curious how you think about the future of this tax and what’s at stake in terms of the visible performance of this and the an anti-tax sentiment that I’ve heard more of in recent years, not simply about this one tax, but as a result of an increase overall in taxes in the Portland metro area in the last five or so years?
Barnes: Right. Our parents are very satisfied, right? We have a 97% satisfaction rate, but there is a concern if the people that are responsible for paying the tax do want to leave. And so the chair’s office will be convening a technical advisory group to think about the funding mechanism, to hear what folks have to say, to study it. So a demographer will be there, an economist. We’ll also have community input, because we want those technical experts to also hear from community that they really value this and what their thoughts would be if there were fundamental changes made based to a change in the financial model.
Miller: Patrick, we have less than a minute left, but what advice would you give somebody, a director of another preschool who is thinking about this right now?
Earnest: I am absolutely for it. It’s such an opportunity, and it’s just an amazing program that I can’t say enough good things about.
Miller: Patrick Earnest and Leslee Barnes, thanks very much.
Barnes: Thank you.
Miller: Patrick Earnest is director of the St. James Child Development Center. He now runs one of the preschools that is taking part in Multnomah County’s Preschool For All program that is under the auspices of Leslee Barnes’s division. She’s a director of the Preschool and Early Learning Division at Multnomah County.
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