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Why we’ll have a fiscal crisis soon

Lining up to spend our money:

Gov. Phil Bredesen on Thursday traveled the state to formally sign a law allowing $25 million in lottery funds to fund a voluntary pre-kindergarten program in Tennessee that he hopes will one day be a national model.

This first installment is expected to be about 300 classrooms for some 6,000 poor or at-risk 4-year-olds. That would triple the number of children already served by a state pilot program, but still represents only a fraction of the estimated 37,000 disadvantaged pre-kindergartners in the state.

“We are going to continue growing this program to the point where every child in our state — every 4-year-old whose parents want to them to be in a program like this — has access to it. That is my goal,” the governor vowed.

We can’t get TennCare squared away, the scholarship money from the lottery is projected to fall short, and there will soon be calls (again) for an income tax. And what do we do? Spend more money on an unnecessary program. In a few years, we’ll be trying to find the money to save this failing program.

7 Responses to “Why we’ll have a fiscal crisis soon”

  1. Steve K. Says:

    I dunno, I’ve got mixed feelings about this.

    My gut feeling is if kids don’t have some sort of transition period in an institutional setting before they start more intensive instruction, they’re a lot more likely to have problems early on in school that either won’t ever get resolved, or which will require expensive remediation to get the kid back on track.

    Kindergarten used to be that transition period, but today (at least here in Northern Virginia), it is far more demanding and intensive. A child who never gets read to, and who in general hasn’t had much other intellectual stimulation for the first five years of his life, seems far more likely to flounder in that setting than a kid who had a year to get used to a being in a classroom with 30 other kids.

    If greatly expanded state-funded nursery school isn’t fiscally realistic, and I suspect there’s a good chance it isn’t, then we need to change the concept of what kindergarten is supposed to be.

  2. SayUncle Says:

    I was going to say isn’t that what kindergarten is for but you beat me to the punch. I concur.

  3. Les Jones Says:

    I’m iffy on this new plan, too. Part of my problem is funding. We can’t pay for TennCare right now. The hope scholarships just started and we’re not sure we can pay for them (especially with UT raising tuition 11%), yet we’re adding another program that uses the same income source.

    There was a report last week on Head Start’s effectiveness. It helped on some things and not on others. It shouldn’t be done away with, but it could stand some improvement.

  4. CL Says:

    The number one reason I’m against this is that we haven’t fully funded the public schools we have now. My son is in high school. He was in a required class and at the end of the semester, they had a major project to do that required using the textbooks. Only about 15% of the students finished it because the school didn’t have enough textbooks for each student to be assigned a book. All the work had to be done in class and by the end of the semester, they just didn’t have enough time.

  5. Marc Says:

    This is the problem of many state lotterys. To get it passed you need to work in “for the children” somewhere in the proposal.

    The new “for the children” program will not get enough funding from the (mostly) poor suckers playing the lottery. This leads to a funding “crisis”. Remember that since it’s “for the children” we need to increase taxes.

    Here in CA lottery monies go for education. Everyone imagined what great things would happen with all the “extra” money for education. The funny part is that it wasn’t “extra” at all, it just freed up the money that used to go to education for the legislators to spend elswhere.

    Sadly, CA’s system is better than TN’s in that it didn’t create a NEW program that is doomed from the start to be underfunded.

  6. mike hollihan Says:

    Not only that, but the Pre-K program is going to be staffed and run by the same great folks who make such excellent scholars of your older children! Sounds like a plan for success to me.

  7. tgirsch Says:

    We’ve certainly got a fair share of funding problems, but I don’t know that this particular program should be the target of our ire. Here in Shelby County, we can afford a quarter of a billion dollar basketball arena, but can’t afford to have our recycling picked up every week (every other week instead).

    I’m sure there are a lot of fiscal crises that could be solved by making better decisions like not building $250M arenas with taxpayer money.

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