Sly James: Kansas City, you are on notice about the importance of pre-K

On Tuesday, Kansas City residents will have the opportunity to make pre-kindergarten affordable and accessible to all kids in our city by voting yes on Question 1. Make no mistake, the absolute most important step we can take is to ensure we are making Kansas City stronger for the future is to provide quality education for all of our children.

When I became mayor in 2011, I started Turn the Page KC, a collective impact organization that focuses on the critical indicator of third grade reading proficiency by focusing on kindergarten readiness, summer reading, school attendance, and access to books. Up until third grade, a child is learning to read, and after that, they are reading to learn. If they are not reading at grade level by the end of third grade, 75 percent will never catch up. Since Turn the Page KC began its work, third grade reading proficiency in Kansas City is getting closer to the state average, closing that gap by a third over the past eight years.

But we will not be able to close that gap completely unless all students start kindergarten on day one ready to learn. Right now, there are about 6,800 4-year-olds in Kansas City, and only about 35 percent of them are enrolled in high-quality pre-K. Just by virtue of attending those programs, these young children have a greater chance of graduating high school, are more likely to attend college, and are less likely to get in trouble with the law and become incarcerated. They are on their way to becoming the kind of citizen our city will need to maintain our incredible momentum and build our economy.

But what about the other 65 percent, the 4,500 4-year-olds out there who are not attending a quality pre-K program? These children aren’t receiving a high-quality pre-K education because of two primary reasons: access and affordability.

Forty percent of Kansas City families with 4-year-olds do not have access to quality pre-K programs in their neighborhood or ZIP code. We have about 2,400 eligible children for just 1,000 openings at Head Start’s pre-K programs. In addition, the cost puts quality pre-K out of reach for many middle- and low-income families. The estimated annual cost of full-day, high-quality pre-K is $12,000 per child, while the median household income is just $47,489. That is simply not feasible for many families.

So what do we do? Are we supposed to wait around for lawmakers in Jefferson City to wake up and do what’s right for these kids and their families? Should we cross our fingers and hope things get better? Wait 10 more years for school leaders to develop a plan? Hope is not a plan.

Waiting 10 years means we have another 45,000 children and young adults who will have missed out on the benefits of high quality early education. Even waiting one year means we will fail the 120 Kansas City Public School pre-K students who will lose a seat in the 2019 school year, and an additional 100 kids who will lose a seat in 2020. Because of a lack of funding, they will lose 11 pre-K classrooms that were serving 220 students.

By virtue of us doing nothing, they will miss out on education that would have taught them the fundamentals of conflict resolution, good classroom habits, learning how to learn, and emotional and physical control. This is unjust and inequitable. This has to stop, and it is up to us.

In the legal profession, when someone is warned or told about a problem, we say that they are “on notice.” Well you are now on notice and you now know what high-quality pre-K means to the lives of our children, their families, our city and our community.

We have an absolute moral obligation as adults who have jobs and who drive our cars back to nice homes at the end of the day to make sure our children have the opportunity to compete in an increasingly technologically-oriented world.

Investing in high-quality pre-K will allow us to close the school readiness gap to ensure there are no differences in child outcomes by race, ethnicity or family income.

We must go out and be apostles for our children and get this done. We must vote yes on Question 1.

This story was originally published March 29, 2019 at 1:46 PM.