By Amy Baskin

Director of Community Ed and Communications

Austin Public Schools had the opportunity to receive new funding this year to support some of our four-year-old preschool students. This funding has created quite a few questions within the community so I hope this article can help to answer some of them.

Voluntary pre-kindergarten was established by Gov. Mark Dayton and the 2016 Minnesota Legislature for the purpose of preparing children for success as they enter kindergarten. The funding allows districts, charter schools with recognized early learning programs, or a combination thereof, to incorporate a voluntary pre-K program into their E-12 system.

Austin Public Schools applied for and received funding for 50 students. We currently serve 96, four-year-old students so the new funding covers a little over half of our students. The majority of the remaining students qualify for scholarship dollars through the state funded Parent Aware program. As a result of the new funding and the scholarship program we were able to provide preschool to our families at no cost to them this year.

As with any state or federal program, new requirements and reporting accompany this new funding. It has its own set of high-quality program standards, such as providing instruction through play-based learning, coordinating appropriate transition to kindergarten, involving parents and families in program planning, and more. Many of these things we were already doing and some we are learning how to implement. The funding is also dependent upon legislative action and although we were approved for three years, that could change with legislative action.

Austin has many excellent preschool programs in the community. Each preschool has unique qualities to provide a variety of options to the community. The programs work closely together to get all children ready for kindergarten. Austin Public Schools is able to serve about one-fourth of the preschool children in the community so working with the other providers in the community is important to make sure that every child has an opportunity to receive a high quality preschool education. We appreciate our community preschool partners.

It truly takes a village to care for our youngest learners, and we have an incredible village working with our early learners. Austin Public Schools will continue to learn how to implement this program to benefit our community.  We are grateful for the opportunity to serve some of the preschool students in the Austin community through this program. For more information on Voluntary Pre-K visit the Minnesota Department of Education website at http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/dse/early/vpk/.