Colorado's universal preschool program undergoing revisions for Year 2

The first year of Colorado’s universal preschool program more than doubled the number of 4-year-olds receiving a year of state-funded education prior to kindergarten, and voter approval in November of Proposition II is putting another $23 million into the program for 2024-25.

Although the launch of UPK, as the program is commonly called, was rushed and had a few glitches, its positives have far outweighed the negatives, state and local officials said.

Christina Taylor, CEO of the Early Childhood Council of Larimer County, called UPK a “huge win,” noting that it's providing more than $4,000 of paid preschool for young children across the state, including 2,384 preschoolers at 149 sites locally.

“We are eager to start working on Year 2 and believe the processes will get even smoother as time goes on,” Taylor wrote in an emailed response to questions from the Coloradoan.

The biggest change for the program's second year, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Early Childhood said last week, is the addition of a preregistration period in February and March designed to emphasize continuity of care. During that period — exact dates have not yet been announced — families can secure available spots with their current provider for their children, as well as any siblings, without participating in the computerized matching process. Children of providers’ employees can also be placed directly with that provider, said Ian McKenzie, the public information officer for CDEC.

“We’re estimating about 50% of current UPK families will be preregistered through this process, which is going to clear up the automated algorithm for those people who are new to the program, and that is going to significantly reduce the timeline for families to find out where they’ve been matched,” McKenzie said.

More: PSD shares data on enrollment trends, facility utilization, budgeting on its website

The matching process for those new to the program or wanting to change providers will run from March through July. Specific dates have not yet been determined. Families can rank up to five providers in the online application process and either accept or reject the match they’re given. Any seats still available after that will be open to direct walk-in enrollment and placement by providers, he said.

Program more than doubled state-funded preschool enrollment in first year

UPK is currently providing tuition-free preschool for up to 15 hours during each week of the school year for 39,154 Colorado 4-year-olds, which represents 62% of 4-year-olds in the state, McKenzie said. That’s more than double the 18,900 — about 23% of the state’s 4-year-olds — who received state funding for preschool in 2022-23, the last year of the state’s previous preschool program, he said. The national average for state-funded preschool enrollment among the 50 states is 29%. Colorado jumped from No. 26 under its previous program into the top 10, projected to be No. 8 in the final year-end tally, with the addition of UPK, McKenzie said.

The number of providers also more than doubled under UPK from the previous Colorado Preschool Program, from 800 or so to 1,905 this month. Those include local school districts, community child care providers and family child care homes. School districts run 40% of the UPK provider sites and have 55% of the enrolled students statewide, McKenzie said.

As its name implies, UPK is open to all Colorado students in the year before entering kindergarten. Families with demonstrated financial need and other weighted factors can qualify for as many as 30 hours a week of paid preschool for 4-year-olds under the program. Some 3-year-olds also qualify for the state funding, which is paid in advance to providers based on the number of children that have been placed with them through the program.

State payments to participating providers, paid in advance quarterly, vary by location throughout the state. Locally, where the Early Childhood Council of Larimer County is the designated local coordinating organization for UPK, payments this year are $4,757.44 per child for 10 hours a week, $5,944.89 for 15 hours a week and $10,511.26 for 30 hours a week.

“This is a huge win in that UPK is reducing the cost burden on families by a significant amount — more than $4,000 — which we know can be an enormous burden on families with young children,” Taylor wrote. “As we continue to work to increase the supply of and access to qualify care, any support for families is welcome.”

Individual education plans provided hurdles in universal preschool launch

Children with an individual education plan, as required by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Colorado Exceptional Children’s Education Act, will also be able to bypass the matching process and be placed directly in programs within their school districts that best fit their needs throughout the year.

That will alleviate one of the biggest frustrations school districts have had with UPK, said Becca Benedict, Poudre School District’s director of early childhood education.

“That is a huge win,” Benedict said. “As next year’s registration comes, we look at our currently enrolled first, we’ll make sure they’re in classes where they need to be, and then all we do is call CDEC and tell them where we put them, because that’s where their service hours are met.”

Parents previously had to register children with IEPs through the UPK system’s BridgeCare software system and rank-order their preferences among various providers. School districts then had to request authorization through a local coordinating organization like the Early Childhood Council of Larimer County to override the computer algorithm to place those children in the appropriate programs. Although the majority of providers participating in UPK are not school districts, children with IEPs can only be placed in school-district run preschool programs under both state and federal law, Benedict said.

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“What it really does is take the burden off the parents,” she said. “They don’t have to go to a separate system and apply. They’ve already come, they’ve already done testing, they’ve already had their IEP meeting. It doesn’t put the burden on them to figure out placement; it lets us do it. Then we just send the ‘in’ letter to the family.”

PSD operates 42 preschool classes at 20 sites, mostly elementary schools, with more than 800 students this year, including 550 in the UPK program and 67 who are paying full tuition, Benedict said. The rest are funded through other state and federal programs and grants.

The district could add more preschool classes to meet the growing demand, she said, but is hesitant to do so without additional funding sources and until UPK guidelines are more clearly established. Changing its current four-day-a-week programs to five and increasing instructional hours beyond those of the elementary schools where the preschools are housed would require remodeling some classrooms and restructuring employment contracts that were ratified in June by employee associations.

Six school districts, along with groups representing school district superintendents and special education directors, went so far as to sue Gov. Jared Polis and state education leaders in August over the UPK program, Colorado Public Radio and others reported, claiming its matching process violates state and federal laws by interfering with school districts' ability to meet the educational needs of preschool children with IEPs.

Benedict said PSD was not involved in that lawsuit, which has yet to be heard in court, but has expressed frustration over those issues and others with UPK.

Among the more significant, she said, was the late change in eligibility announced in July, when the state realized it didn’t have enough money to cover full-day preschool for children with just one of its five qualifying factors — low income, individualized education plan, homelessness, dual-language learner and foster/kinship care — and raised the minimum number of factors to two. That left many who had only met the low-income criteria with only half-day rather than full-day coverage and facing a monthly bill of more than $4,500 per child to cover the difference.

PSD, Benedict said, scraped together $470,000 in money from various grants to cover the difference for those families in 2023-24 but doesn’t have a funding source to do so in future years.

Heather Blanco, chief program officer for the Early Childhood Council of Larimer County, said “a handful of families” reached out to her organization for clarification on that change, as well.

“We worked with each family individually and were able to come to resolutions, with help and support from CDEC, that worked for each family,” Blanco wrote in response to emailed questions.

A proposed revision for 2024-25 that still needs to be approved in January addresses that issue, McKenzie said, with the addition of a sixth qualifying factor for families that meet federal poverty guidelines. That factor, coupled with the existing low-income qualifying factor, will ensure “that anybody at that guideline and under will automatically qualify for full day because they’ll have two qualifying standards,” he said.

Benedict also expressed concern about the funding and billing process, saying that she has yet to receive a bill from CDEC that correctly lists UPK participants and the number of hours of preschool they are receiving. The first bill, in August, she said was “100% wrong,” while the latest for December was about “25% wrong.”

Community providers are not experiencing those issues, Blanco wrote.

“Our providers carefully listened to how the UPK hour requirements for UPK would work and implemented that accordingly,” she wrote. “It’s a learning curve to understand how the payments for a new program will work.”

Tweaks being made to accommodate special education

Another issue PSD is having with UPK, Benedict said, is maintaining the federally required 50-50 ratio of special education and typically developing students for integrated services classrooms. School districts are the only UPK providers authorized to accept 3-year-olds with qualifying factors, McKenzie said. That puts more special-education students with IEPs into PSD preschool classrooms that have to be offset with typically developing students. With typically developing 4-year-olds in UPK able to choose a community provider, it’s difficult to achieve that balance, Benedict said.

PSD, she said, had to turn away 246 UPK-qualified 3-year-olds this year. The district found other funding sources to accommodate 54 of those students, she said.

“They don’t even qualify unless they have some risk factor, so all those kids have some risk factor, and we had to decline them. … That means 192 kids at risk tried to get into the system and couldn’t. That’s a lot of kids.”

Kids, she said, that would benefit the most from the socialization and early intervention opportunities they would have in a PSD preschool classroom.

“We still have IEPs coming in as soon as kids turn 3, so we’ll probably add another 50 IEPs between now and the end of the year, and there are classrooms that I can’t add them to, even with spaces open, because that would push us over the ratio,” Benedict said.

Despite hiccups, support remains strong for Colorado universal preschool

Despite her frustration with some elements of UPK, particularly concerns about confusing communication between CDEC, providers and families, Benedict is still a strong supporter of the program. She has been involved in recent discussions with state legislators, CDEC, local organizing coordinators and others about ways to streamline and improve UPK.

The local coordinating organizations meet frequently with CDEC and its executive director, Lisa Roy, Taylor wrote. There’s also a 15-member rules advisory council with representatives of various stakeholder groups that meet monthly with Roy to discuss feedback on the program and proposed changes.

There’s a “learning curve” involved in the launch of a program as extensive as UPK, Taylor wrote. The benefits for children and families are well worth the effort her organization and others are investing to make it work.

“The amazing thing about UPK is families have more options regarding programs they can attend, so families are not restricted only to providers in their county,” wrote Logan Mansanarez, the UPK manager for the Early Childhood Council of Larimer County. “… I think we can focus on the negative all we want, but at the end of the day, over 40,000 families are receiving some kind of financial support for preschool in a program that has been developing since it was launched.”

Reporter Kelly Lyell covers education, breaking news, some sports and other topics of interest for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, twitter.com/KellyLyell or facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Collins Coloradoan: Colorado's universal preschool program undergoing revisions for Year 2