Pre-K enrollment had sharp decline during pandemic. Are those students coming back?
For the first time since 1996, less than half of U.S. children ages 3 and 4 enrolled in pre-K during the first year of the pandemic, newly released data show.
The youngest age category made up a sizable portion of the 2.9 million person school enrollment drop between 2019 and 2020, alarming experts and educators who point out the importance of early learning to future academic success.
As school districts reopened almost completely in person this year, officials had hoped to rebound to pre-pandemic enrollment levels, calling it a realistic goal. But data shared with the Star-Telegram show that Fort Worth ISD enrolled just over 400 more pre-K students than last year, over 900 less than pre-pandemic enrollment levels.
With the coronavirus still posing an outsized risk at the beginning of the school year however, they are counting it as a win.
“Just looking at the dip we saw with the main COVID year, 2020-21, and then the rebound that we saw in this current year ... I think that speaks to the effort that was undertaken here,” Mike Naughton, the director of facility planning for the district said.
The district’s recruiting efforts, which have expanded and become more targeted to specific neighborhoods and regions in recent years, relied heavily on partnerships with community organizations, food banks and neighborhood groups when schools shut down and families stayed in their homes.
“I don’t think we did more, but I feel we did it differently,” said Jennifer Perez, the director of Family and Community Outreach and Marketing for the district. “We were able to grow our partnerships with LVTrise, our family action center in East Fort Worth … and there were so many area food banks.”
But the growing number of students entering school with no early learning experiences like pre-K or Kindergarten could complicate the already difficult task of closing learning gaps formed over the course of the pandemic.
Lost learning
“It’s really concerning,” said David Feigen, an early childhood policy associate for Texans Care for Children. “Experts have pointed us to really significant learning loss that’s taken place over the last year and a half, and a lack of access to effective pre-K programs is going to exacerbate that tremendously.”
Kara Waddell, the CEO of Child Care Associates, which partners with several Tarrant County school districts to provide early learning programs like Head Start, said that during the pandemic, younger children were less likely to be enrolled in formal programs than older ones.
“What is interesting to think about is last year, those 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds were less likely to have been in a child care program, and now they are showing up in Kindergarten” she said. “So what we are going to see over the next few years is this compounding effect of children who have just not had the same exposure to high quality early learning whether in child care Head Start or pre-Kindergarten.”
Bree Dusseault, principal at the Center for Reinventing Public Education, said that this will spur a need for districts to provide more resources to students as they enter school with less experience.
“For students who are coming into those early grades without much orientation at home or much support academically or socially or emotionally for the last 20 months, they are at a greater risk of not being prepared entering a school year,” she said. “There may be students who are coming in who will need more support and foundational skills, just learning the art of ... schooling, how to be in class, how to work with how to share how to work with your peers, there are a lot of things that preschool and kindergarten programs help kids do.”
Feigen said that beyond getting the virus under control, school districts should be centering their focus on recruitment efforts.
“I think that it does need to be a top priority for the funding implications, but more than that, for kids social emotional learning skills that they’re going to need and that pre-K will be so instrumental in providing,” he said. “I just think we have to make sure it’s a top priority and understand that for some families, they won’t feel safe yet to send their kids back and that’s okay. But we need to make sure that they have the resources to support their kids at home. And when they feel safe to send their kids back, we’ll be ready for them.”
Charter influence
While the district doesn’t track where students go when they leave the district, some of the enrollment declines in FWISD can be attributed to parents leaving for local charter and private schools.
That was the case for Adrianne Porcelli, who enrolled her son in Fort Worth ISD at the beginning of the last school year.
“It was mid-pandemic, so the first month was virtual,” she said. “It was kind of funny for my four, almost 5-year-old to sit and look at a computer screen for four hours a day.”
But even when schools opened in-person, Porcelli’s son struggled to focus, with teachers, bogged down by technology, attempted to teach both virtual and in-person classes, she said.
“It just wasn’t a good fit,” she said. “ I can’t have my 5-year-old already not liking school.”
Between that and her son’s artistic inclinations, she chose to take her son out of the district and enroll him in the Texas School of the Arts, a local charter school.
With a growing presence of charters in areas that the school district serves, including a new charter school in the Stop Six neighborhood, district officials said they anticipate losing some students to those campuses every year.
“It’s definitely a consideration,” Naughton, the facilities director, said. “We project that some of the students will end up there … and we often see that some of those students come back after a year or two.”
But the losses seen in the wake of the pandemic far outweigh the steady loss the district has seen in recent years.
While the district had been declining in overall enrollment since the 2016-17 school year, pre-K enrollment had been steadily growing before the pandemic. Unlike many other districts, pre-K is available to all students who wish to enroll in the school district, not just those required under state law.
In the 2019-20 school year, 5,430 students enrolled in pre-K in FWISD, more than any other time in the last 10 years, according to Texas Education Agency data.
Looking Forward
Perez said that the partnerships formed over the course of the pandemic along with the use of virtual information sessions to assist parents will continue to be part of the recruitment process even after the pandemic stops being a factor.
As the district gears up to start recruitment efforts for next year in November, they have spent the beginning of the year focused on serving students that did enroll.
“Right now we are really focusing on making sure the students that we have right now are being provided strong quality, tier one pre-K instruction,” Olayinka Moore-Ojo, the early learning director for the district said. “We continue to reflect and analyze all aspects of our recruitment efforts to make a plan for the future.”
John Cope, the director of creative communications for the district, said that as families become more comfortable as the threat of the coronavirus becomes less disruptive, the district will return to the tactics they were using before to find areas that need special recruitment attention.
“As the data starts to come in with pre-K applications, we can see which schools are full and which schools have a lot of seats left,” he said. “And we start geotargeting at that point.”
Neighborhoods that are still identified as having few kids enrolling in pre-K are visited in-person with events that offer registration, free supplies and reading materials for students.
Nationally, a survey by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University found that fear of the pandemic and unemployment were leading causes for parents not enrolling their children in pre-K. Steve Barnett, the senior co-director of the institute, said those factors are still present, holding national pre-K enrollment numbers that are still being collected below pre-pandemic levels.
“To the extent that the pandemic gets under control, and programs operate in a way that reassures parents that their kids are safe, then that cause of the problem greatly diminishes,” he said. “The question of what happens with work is more complicated. I don’t think we know the answer to that.”
This story was originally published November 3, 2021 at 5:30 AM with the headline "Pre-K enrollment had sharp decline during pandemic. Are those students coming back?."
