Our Views: Picard legacy needs support
W ith education funding under pressure in the proposed new state budget, one item held steady despite cuts elsewhere: Louisiana’s LA4 pre-kindergarten program.
While it’s hardly full funding, in the sense that there’s a great need for early childhood education, at $76 million in the governor’s proposal to the Legislature, LA4 is one of the significant winners in the state Department of Education budget.
This testifies to the support of Gov. Bobby Jindal for early childhood education, said John White, the new state superintendent of education. More than 16,000 students participate in six-hour programs and another 1,000 are in four-hour before- and after-school enrichment programs for at-risk 4-year-olds, the department said.
Jindal appropriately alluded to LA4 in his remarks at the opening of the Cecil J. Picard Center for Childhood Development and Lifelong Learning.
The new center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette is named for the late superintendent, “a staunch advocate of strong pre-K programs that prepare our students for the classroom,” Jindal said.
Research at the center will drive, we hope, eventual increases in pre-K funding for at-risk children.
While it’s not the only way the state can get a grip on Louisiana’s troubling educational performance, it is one that commands a great deal of support across the political spectrum — in no small part because of proselytizing for early childhood education by Cecil Picard.
Jindal said he also will propose in the 2012 Legislature that the state do more to coordinate the several programs and disparate funding streams that seek to serve children before first grade.
In principle, we welcome this initiative, even if we question some of the governor’s numbers. All too often in his remarks on education — an expensive and labor-intensive business, after all — Jindal has a way of using the largest number possible to characterize current spending.
Thus, he says, the state already spends nearly $1.4 billion going into publicly funded early childhood education and health-care programs, not even including an additional $150 million for Head Start. The latter, and probably much of the former, are federal funds passing through the state. Much of the LA4 funding of which Jindal and White are proud comes from sources other than the state general fund.
Note also the reference to “health care.” While we do not doubt the value of health care for children, it seems quite a stretch to say that’s money that is spent on education of poor children.
The use of such a bloated number is a way Jindal seeks to head off suggestions that more state dollars are needed in education.
With the introduction of actual legislation, we hope to see from Jindal a constructive program for early childhood education that can command widespread support. In this area, unlike the hot-button discussions of vouchers or teacher tenure, the possibility of a broad coalition of support is possible.
And from the Picard Center, we expect to see real numbers about early childhood education, and how much really should be invested to give, as the governor said, “all of our children the tools to succeed and pursue their dreams here at home.”