These Tarrant County school districts offer universal pre-K to all 4-year-olds. Here’s why
In Texas, state-funded pre-K is limited to certain 3- and 4-year-olds who, for example, qualify for the national school lunch program, have a parent in the armed forces or are unable to speak English. In North Texas, though, some local school districts have opted to open their pre-K-4 classrooms to additional children who don’t meet this state criteria, in what’s known as a universal program.
Fort Worth ISD and Arlington ISD are among the public school districts in Tarrant County that offer a seat to any 4-year-old in the community whose family wishes to enroll them in their pre-kindergarten programs. It’s unclear how many Texas districts have embraced a universal pre-K model locally, but across the U.S., it’s a format of early childhood education that’s been rolled out in a mix of both blue and red states, including Oklahoma.
Texas serves the highest number of pre-K children in the U.S., but according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, the state’s pressing issues are quality improvement and funding structure. With the state’s 2025 legislative session currently going on three weeks, there are a handful of bills that have been introduced to expand pre-K eligibility to any 4-year-old, but it remains to be seen if any would survive the dizzying legislative process to become law.
Arlington ISD’s & Fort Worth ISD’s programs
Arlington Independent School District began its universal pre-K program in the 2022-23 school year alongside a rollout of a unique early childhood curriculum focused on Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. This happened two years after the district expanded its half-day model to a full day in 2020-2021 and three years after voters approved a 2019 bond that, in part, funded additions, renovations and furnishings to pre-K classrooms.
“I think the heart of all of this was to make sure that we were providing equity for all our citizens and also providing equity for all our students and families,” said Director of Early Childhood Learning Jackeline Orsini. “We know the effects of students not having pre-K or that foundation in pre-K when they’re going to kindergarten.”
The district offers the program at all of its elementary schools except for two, and it prioritizes students who live in a school zone of a certain campus before opening up seats to others, Orsini said. But no 4-year-old will be denied a spot in the district.
“If we don’t have more seats (at a certain campus), our job here is not to tell them ‘No’ and close the doors. We’ll find another seat at another school. It may not be your first choice, but it’s going to be free and it’s going to be still high-quality,” she added.
She also mentioned the program as an opportunity for the district and staff to start building relationships with families early on and to start identifying specific needs for students with disabilities. Additionally, a full-day program has allowed parents to go back to work or school who were previously unable to when only a half day of instruction was offered to 4-year-olds.
“It was also the right timing. It was right after COVID. Many of our families and kids didn’t have the opportunity to socialize, so having them to come to school and (giving) them a full-day program and model and for free, it was also an opportunity for us to make contributions to society in a very difficult time,” Orsini said.
In the 2023-24 school year, TEA data shows the percentage of all Arlington ISD students considered to be kindergarten ready – 57.5% — increased by almost 9 percentage points from the previous school year. The percentage of students who attended public pre-K in Texas the prior year for at least 80 days and were considered kindergarten ready was almost 71%, an increase of 2.5 percentage points.
The Fort Worth Independent School District began a “soft roll out” of its universal pre-K program a decade ago during its 2014-2015 school year, according to a study commissioned by Camp Fire First Texas — a local nonprofit that offers professional development programs to early childhood educators. The study analyzed the impact of the district’s universal program on community child care providers, who said at the time they would suffer financially as a result of the rollout. Among the recommendations to come out of the study, one was encouraging districts to create partnerships with local child care providers and collaborate to provide pre-K services. Fort Worth ISD began doing these collaborations as early as 1993, according to the study.
“What we don’t want to see as a result of this study is a negative perception of the value of pre-K programs or those who are working to implement them,” said Lyn Lucas, who was Camp Fire First Texas’ division vice president when the study was released in 2015.
“We know that for every $1 spent on quality early childhood programs, a 7% return is seen. We do hope this study provides awareness for Fort Worth, and any community venturing down this path, to apply the recommendations to: seek opportunities to increase public/private partnerships; improve the communication between the public school districts and private, local child care providers and work on legislation that allows increased subsidy reimbursement (CCMS) to quality programs serving the 0-3 age groups while also increasing the number of CCMS spaces for these age groups,” she added in the 2015 statement.
The financial constraints faced by child care providers who lose pre-K-aged students to free programs offered by local school districts is still an abrasive topic of discussion. During a Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development hearing in November ahead of Texas’ current 2025 legislative session, a child care operator testified that his business lost more than $1 million in the past year due to a loss of 3- and 4-year-olds to the local school district.
In regards to Fort Worth ISD’s universal program, officials say it has contributed positively to the local community and gives flexibility to families.
“Since I’ve been here, (the universal program) provides academic opportunities for all the students that are in the program, which has long-term benefits and investment to the city as a whole,” said Olayinka Moore-Ojo, executive director of early learning, who joined the district in 2019. “Part of our universal pre-K process means that families can choose one of the elementary schools within the district. So it doesn’t just have to be the elementary school that’s their home campus.”
Chad Davis, the district’s director of data analysis and reporting, said a state assessment given to kindergarten students at the beginning of each school year has shown “quite extensively” that the percentage of students who are on track toward mastering phonological awareness, or the ability to detect and manipulate sounds, is “significantly higher” than students who do not attend pre-K in Fort Worth ISD. In the fall of 2022, the last time the analysis was done by the district, 66% of pre-K alumni were on track versus 37% of non-pre-K alumni. The measure had been tracked by the school board at the time as an indicator connected to third-grade literacy.
“That has been the case prior to universal pre-K,” he said. “Universal pre-K knocks down some of the barriers for some students that wouldn’t be getting into pre-K, but a large percentage of our students are already involved in Fort Worth ISD pre-K.”
The district doesn’t track long-term performance of students who attend pre-K versus students who don’t because “the national literature is pretty extensive on the impacts that pre-K has on students that we serve,” he said.
“There’s very extensive literature based out there on the positive impact of pre-K for students of poverty (and) of students of color,” he said.
In the 2015-16 school year, the year following Fort Worth ISD’s early implementation of its universal pre-K program, TEA data shows the overall percentage of students considered to be kindergarten ready – about 67% — increased by almost 25 percentage points from the previous school year. The percentage of students who attended public pre-K in Texas the prior year for at least 80 days and were considered kindergarten ready was about 75%, an increase of almost 20 percentage points. The data also notes that the overall percentage of students who were assessed increased by 34 percentage points, with 96% assessed during the 2015-16 school year.
Almost a decade later, though, the data shows a rougher picture. In the 2023-24 school year, only 39% of all Fort Worth ISD kindergartners were considered kindergarten ready, a decrease of ½ a percentage point from the prior year. Of the students who attended public pre-K in Texas the prior year for at least 80 days, 51% were considered kindergarten ready — a decrease of almost 2 percentage points. The percentage of students assessed in both categories also lowered.
Fort Worth ISD’s academic performance across all grades has staggered over the past 10 years, and district officials have acknowledged the lack of growth while facing community scrutiny at the beginning of the current school year. Interim Superintendent Karen Molinar and school board members are trying to address the crisis head on, emphasizing a turnaround focused on improving literacy.
The board recently approved a new strategic plan with annual academic goals and targets set for the next five years. Central administration staff have been sent to campuses to provide intervention and tutoring, most of which is focused on reading, and the district is developing a detailed literacy plan that addresses budget alignments, school resources and student progress monitoring.
The decrease in kindergarten readiness over the past decade isn’t unique to Fort Worth ISD. In the 2015-16 school year, about 70% of all Arlington ISD’s kindergartners were considered kindergarten ready — a year where major gains were also seen for this metric, almost 47 percentage points, compared to the previous year.
Across the state of Texas, 60% of students were kindergarten ready in the 2015-16 school year. In 2023-24, this metric decreased to 52%.
What research shows in Tulsa
Bill Gormley, professor emeritus at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and co-director at the Center for Research on Children in the U.S., and his team have studied Tulsa’s universal pre-K program for more than 20 years after Oklahoma became the second U.S. state to offer the program to all 4-year-olds — regardless of income — starting in 1998.
The initial focus was to analyze the programs’ short-term effects on students’ school readiness, which showed “impressive gains in pre-reading, pre-writing and pre-math skills,” according to Gormley. But over the last two decades, the follow-up research points to long-term, positive outcomes for the students themselves, the taxpayers footing the bill and their local community.
Gormley reflected on this research in the Journal of the National Association of State Board of Education in May 2024, and recently with the Star-Telegram, noting benefits that stayed with students throughout their K-12 career and into college. Seventh-graders who had attended the universal program were less likely to have repeated a grade throughout elementary and middle school versus their counterparts who hadn’t attended it. Tulsa pre-K alumni also outpaced nonalumni by at least 11 percentage points when looking at college enrollment. Additionally, the benefits of the program outweighed the cost by almost 3 to 1.
“The long-term effects depend not only on what happens in pre-K, but also on what goes on in elementary school, middle school and high school classrooms. So you can have the strongest pre-K program in the world and a weak K-12 system, and pre-K is not going to do much for you,” Gormley told the Star-Telegram.
In terms of the impact of Tulsa’s pre-K attendees being more likely to attend college, the benefits to society are “enormous,” Gormley added. People who are college-educated are more likely to pay higher taxes that contribute to social programs, are more likely to have stable relationships and are less likely to engage in crime.
One caveat in the research shows pre-K participants scored higher on standardized math tests, but not reading tests, once reaching third grade. Gormley said this somewhat surprised him and his team.
“The Tulsa public schools teachers were definitely trying to teach both reading and math skills, but ultimately we concluded that the math skills were a little bit more likely to persist than the reading skills into third grade, partly because if there’s one area where schools make a unique difference, it’s in math instruction,” he said.
This story was originally published February 5, 2025 at 5:30 AM.
