The Harold K.L. Castle Foundation’s education grantmaking primarily focuses on the K-12 through higher education pathways for students. But sometimes, an opportunity is too good to pass up. This is certainly the case with our recent investment (of time more than money) in the effort to dramatically expand preschool access in Hawaii.
Why is this so important? Because we now have scientific evidence that early learning experiences are essential to prepare keiki for a lifetime of learning. About 85% of brain development occurs before the age of 5. When preschool is available and affordable, parents can get back to work full-time, children enter kindergarten ready to thrive, and Hawaii’s workforce and local businesses are better off. Decades of evidence shows that children with access to early learning are more likely to graduate from high school and college, achieve higher wages, and avoid incarceration and reliance on welfare.
Yet preschool in Hawaii today is the story of haves and have nots and is the beginning of the unacceptable achievement gap in education. In our state, 54% of 3- and 4-year-olds (that’s about 17,000 children) are not in childcare or preschool. Why? We do not have nearly enough preschool seats to meet the need, and early learning is very expensive for parents. Hawaii is far behind where we need to be, and we’re actually sliding backwards. Since the pandemic began, we’ve lost 3,600 seats, and at least six preschools have closed. According to the National Institute for Early Education Research, Hawaii is 43rd in the nation when it comes to state funding for early learning—in fact, the State-funded public preschool seats serve only 2.3% of our 4-year-olds. We must do better.
But political will is building. In 2020, the legislature passed Act 46, which commits Hawaii to provide early learning access to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032. But no funds were allotted to make this happen.
Then a targeted but nonpartisan effort called Commit to Keiki was created in 2021 with funding and staff support from the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation and seven other funders. Commit to Keiki did several rounds of polling that clearly showed overwhelming support by voters to expand opportunities for early learning and care, including not just preschool access but also support to address early childhood mental health needs and to prevent family violence. Commit to Keiki then built a public messaging campaign, a website, and a set of interviews with every major candidate for governor to help them “commit to keiki” by giving early childhood high priority in their budget and policy making if they were elected.
This effort, led by the Early Childhood Action Strategy, has already borne fruit. Last year the legislature passed HB2000, which appropriates $200 million to the School Facilities Authority (SFA), a new quasi-independent authority, to renovate existing school facilities and build new ones to “expand access to pre-kindergarten to eligible children of the State.” Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke has put in a tremendous amount of work to build an ambitious facility-building strategy while also proposing a major expansion of the Preschool Open Doors program to help ALICE families to afford the tuition at existing independent preschools. Corporate leaders through the Hawaii Business Roundtable and the Hawaii Executive Collaborative have once again raised early learning as a priority for our state. And three strong newly confirmed public leaders whom we trust sit atop key state agencies needed to expand preschool access; those are the Hawaii Department of Education, the Executive Office on Early Learning, and the School Facilities Authority. Finally, there is serious money and political will to reduce our preschool-seat deficit.
We are racing against the clock. Any of that $200 million not encumbered as of June 30, 2024 will lapse. The energetic new SFA director, former Ka’u-Kea’au-Pahoa Complex Area Superintendent Keone Farias, has no office, only two staff, and a set of state procurement rules that make it difficult to move quickly to create new preschool facilities.
To help win that race, the CEOs of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation are taking the lead to raise $1 million in philanthropic and in-kind support to ensure that the full $200M is spent well and to get as many pre-k classrooms created as soon as possible. This pooled field of interest fund, called the Every Keiki Fund, will work closely with the SFA and other key stakeholders such as the state’s Executive Office on Early Learning and the Department of Education to support two major kinds of investments to help expand publicly funded preschool:
- to provide paid consulting or in-kind services for site assessment and selection; design, engineering, planning and permitting; financial projections and fiscal control; construction management; and other technical assistance. This should create a strong pipeline of classroom projects far more quickly than would be possible with the state’s $200 million allocation alone.
- to invest in expanding the early-learning workforce in partnership with higher education institutions such as the University of Hawaii and Chaminade University. Funds would likely support the expansion of teacher training, certification, recruitment, and scholarships for low-income candidates for early childhood education.
Is this mission creep for us? No. Although the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation’s education grantmaking largely focuses on K-12 and higher education levels, we know that the achievement gap begins before age 5. Therefore, the Foundation has seized a few opportunities over the years to push for increased preschool access and improved policy change—most recently with our $125,000 investment in the Commit to Keiki campaign and our $100,000 investment in the Every Keiki Fund. To learn more, visit www.committokeiki.org.
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