Finance Options [California Preschool Planning Toolkit 8a]

There are both short-term and long-term approaches to financing access to quality preschool for all four year-olds. A long-term strategy would be to secure a stable revenue source and an investment in preschool equivalent to that in kindergarten. The short-term approach can best be summed up as “creative financing”.

This section addresses finance options from a local perspective and focuses primarily on options that could help finance preschool with or without a dedicated statewide funding source. Some of the options are sufficient to sustain preschool, at least within targeted neighborhoods, without a new statewide dedicated revenue source.

It is worth the effort to understand these financing strategies even in the event that the state eventually does decide to finance preschool for all four-year-olds. As is the case with K-12 education in the United States, even preschool initiatives with a dedicated state revenue source are unlikely to receive all the support they need from state government. On average, public K-12 education receives 49 percent of its revenues from state government, 43 percent from local government, and 8 percent from the federal government (NIEER 2005 State Preschool Yearbook, p. 19). This section reviews some of the approaches currently being employed to finance preschool at the local level in California, and includes a compendium of finance options, including most recent funding levels and contact information.

This document is part of the California Preschool Planning Toolkit.