VALDOSTA — According to Jennifer Steedley, director of public relations for Valdosta City Schools, research shows that children who attend pre-school are more likely to graduate from high school and continue onto college.

They are also less likely to need public assistance when they are adults and are less likely to be incarcerated or arrested when they are older teens and adults.

For fiscal year 2012, the State of Georgia’s Budget Report recommended that over $1 billion be allocated to the Department of Corrections. In 2011, CNBC reported that nationally, social welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries.

Education is always said to be an investment in one’s future, but with these statistics, it is evident that education is an investment in everyone’s future. It is the taxpayers who seem to lose when a child doesn’t succeed academically.

While K-12 public schools receive state funding, pre-K remains unfunded by the state as it is not a true prerequisite to kindergarten, meaning children do not have to attend pre-K to enter kindergarten.

“School isn’t mandatory until age 6,” said Susan Adams, the assistant commissioner for Georgia’s pre-K program at the Department of Early Care and Learning (DECAL).

K-12 is funded through FTE (Full-Time Equivalent) funds while pre-K is funded through the Georgia Lottery program which is also responsible for funding the HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) scholarship program. Funds from the lottery program are also used towards slots in private pre-K’s as well.

“I am not aware of any plans to expand FTE funds to cover Pre-K, especially with the current funding crisis,” said Iris A. Mathis, Director of Professional Learning, Testing K-8, Pre-Kindergarten, ESOL and Migrant for Lowndes County Schools (LCS).

According to the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute’s (GPBI) fiscal year 2013 budget analysis, in fiscal year 2012, funding for Georgia’s pre-K program was cut by $54 million due to legislative changes. For fiscal year 2013, the governor allocates $298.6 million in educational lottery revenue towards Georgia’s pre-K program which is more than $2 million less than fiscal year 2012.

“Last year we did take

 a significant budget cut,” said Adams.

While the money allocated to DECAL from the Georgia lottery was less, Adams stated that they still receive the same percentage of funding which equates to about a third.

“Right now our department is not concerned about looking at the program ending,” said Adams.

For the 2011-2012 school year, Lowndes County Schools received $1,077,132.96 from the Georgia Lottery program to fund pre-K programs and Valdosta City School’s received $269,283. For LCS, that allows for 352 slots which they easily fill, while VCS has only 88 slots.

For the 2012-2013 school year, LCS received 407 applications leaving 55 children in limbo and VCS had approximately 200 applications leaving 112 students without a public pre-K option.

“Unfortunately, right now we don’t have the money to serve every child,” said Adams.

In just the city and county school systems alone, 167 children who apply are left without a slot in a public pre-K program. Many more children are displaced as a result of not being entered into the lottery as their parents don’t fill out the application.

“Georgia is one of the states that offers one of the largest pre-K programs,” said Adams.

In April, the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) released a study called “The State of Preschool 2011: State Preschool Yearbook” which showed that Georgia is among only four states attaining ten quality standard benchmarks — including teacher educational levels, small class sizes and manageable student-to-teacher ratios — for its pre-K program and demonstrated that it had one of the best pre-K programs in the nation.

However, as pointed out by Nancy Badertscher of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, NIEER’s report also predicts that Georgia’s quality rating will fall because of decisions by Gov. Nathan Deal and the legislature to cut 20 days from the pre-K school year and increase class sizes by two students for the current school year. Deal recently pushed through a proposal in the recent General Assembly to restore 10 of those 20 days. Other changes to Georgia’s pre-K program included teachers receiving a 10 percent pay cut and schools only receiving 94 percent of the operating funds that they currently receive.

While nearly 66 percent of all 4-year-olds in Georgia were served by state pre-K and Head Start programs in the 2010-2011 school year, according to a press release from DECAL, that still left nearly 43,000 children without a public pre-K option.

DECAL has made an effort to “make good” on those children who lost the pre-K lottery by introducing a six week Summer Transition Program for rising kindergartners who either did not attend Georgia’s pre-K or Head Start, or attended but needed additional support to be ready for kindergarten.

Valdosta City Schools received a grant for the Summer Transition Program, but due to budget cuts at the state level, no new classes were awarded in the state last year, nor will any be awarded this next school year.

“The grant is a six week program and serves 32 children,” said Steedley. “The total of the grant was $40,000 . . . The goal of the program is to successfully transition these students into kindergarten.”

When Georgia introduced an initiative in 1995 that aimed to provide free pre-K for children regardless of financial circumstances, it was hailed nationwide as groundbreaking and innovative, which was significant for the often lagging public education system. Now as the program rolls into the middle of 2012, there is still no study in Georgia that demonstrates the program is academically significant.

“That research hasn’t been done in Georgia,” said Adams, as she explained that Georgia is in the first year of a longitudinal study of the program.

For Georgia, the question is where to funnel the money: to pre-K programs that are proven to lessen a child’s burden on taxpayers later in life, or to additional prison and welfare costs.

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