Javonda Harris enrolled her daughter Laila in pre-kindergarten nearly a decade ago. To this day, Harris says it’s one of the finest things she’s done as a mom.
“I had the option to keep her home, keep her in daycare for another year,” Harris said. “But I put her in pre-k, and it is one of the best decisions I ever made.” Her daughter entered pre-k in 2016 at Dorothy Height Charter School on the West Bank.
Pre-k laid the foundation for Laila’s next eight years at Height, Harris said. As a young child, Laila developed confidence and problem-solving skills, and learned to communicate and collaborate with other students. She finished her eighth-grade year as captain of the majorette team, “walking around like she owned the place because she had been there so long,” her mother said.
Early-childhood advocates and school runners say pre-k helps young children prepare for the routines and requirements of a kindergarten classroom, and allows parents to return to the workforce. But in New Orleans — as in the rest of Louisiana — limited funding and restrictions on student-teacher ratios mean that pre-k classes cost schools more money than K-12 classes. The demand for pre-k seats here often exceeds the supply.
In some cases, schools with high performance scores and name recognition are not motivated to offer pre-k because they have no trouble filling their kindergarten seats. Other schools that hope to boost their retention are more likely to start costly pre-k programs, said early-education researcher Lindsay Weixler, an associate director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans and a senior research fellow at Tulane University.
For instance, Crescent City Schools, a six-school charter network, has always prioritized offering pre-k because it helps prepare students for kindergarten, said Kate Mehok, the network’s co-founder and chief executive officer.
As Weixler described, pre-k also works as a retention strategy, she said: most of the families with children in pre-k at Crescent City stay for kindergarten and subsequent grades. Pre-k helps Crescent City and other charters that offer it fill more of their classrooms amid the city’s declining student enrollment.
“Given the landscape we have in New Orleans, where we have more seats than kids, it’s nice to have kids in your building,” Mehok said.
Pre-k is more expensive, but funding doesn’t reflect that
Many schools don’t offer pre-k partly because it’s not fully funded in Louisiana, said Teresa Falgoust, the chief data and impact officer for Agenda for Children, a Louisiana nonprofit that works to expand childcare access statewide. The state gives schools nearly $10,000 per K-12 student, but only about half of that for pre-k.
Pre-k also is more expensive to operate. It requires more teaching staff per student: the student-to-teacher ratio in a pre-k classroom must be 10:1, compared with 20:1 for older grades. Other factors also play a role, like access to ground-floor classroom space or having a bathroom near a pre-k classroom.
“If you’re a school, you’re essentially losing money by offering pre-k,” Falgoust said. “In the face of challenging budgets, not all schools are able to make that decision.”
Relying on individual schools to choose whether to offer pre-k does not adequately consider how important high-quality childcare can be for young students, said Weixler, who has spent years studying the impacts of decentralized schools in New Orleans offering pre-k.
“This decentralized decision-making plus the underfunding of the program creates this mismatch where a supply-and-demand market is not going to solve the problem,” she said.
To Weixler, the solution is simple: the state should fully fund all pre-k seats — especially right now, as enrollment is falling.
“Everybody is staring down this demographic cliff of lower birth rates and migration out of the city … The many-birds-one-stone solution here is money,” she said.
A tangle of budgetary shifts
An executive order proposed by Gov. Jeff Landry and approved by the legislature redirected roughly $168 million in statewide education funding to cover stipends for teachers and aides. The order, which school leaders have said will increase strain on already-tight budgets, will reduce the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP) — the state formula that doles out money that schools use for teacher pay, textbooks, special education services and other costs — by about 5%.
Nyesha Veal, the chief financial officer for New Orleans Public Schools, said at a meeting of the Orleans Parish School Board’s budget and finance committee that Landry’s executive order reduced the district’s MFP allocation by about $10.2 million. Instead of removing that money from its per-pupil funding, the district reduced its “Level 4” funds, which pay for specific programs and stipends, including pay raises and some special education costs for pre-k. This allows schools to decide individually how to make ends meet, Veal said.
“We know that the support for the allocation of the executive order was by school, so we want to make sure that that impact is by school,” Veal said at the meeting on Tuesday.
Now, schools must decide what to do next — and what to cut. Because of its higher per-pupil costs and lower rates of reimbursement, pre-k seats may be cut from tight school budgets, and some schools may choose not to offer pre-k at all.
The state legislature’s vote came after Crescent City Schools had passed its budget for the 2026-27 school year, Mehok said. The network still plans to offer pre-k on all its campuses — but it must also figure out what to do about the roughly $750,000 that the executive order reallocated to pay for the teacher stipends mandated by Landry’s executive order, she said.
“Much like all districts and other charters across the state, we are currently considering a variety of options on how to make up for that lost money,” she said.
State-funded pre-k seats
Laila and thousands of other students attend pre-k through the Cecil J. Picard LA 4 Early Childhood Program, a state-funded program that provides free pre-k seats annually for more than 16,000 Louisiana children in low-income families. Other state programs also provide some seats.
This fall, New Orleans Public Schools will offer 1,280 state-funded pre-k seats, according to Taslin Alfonzo, a spokesperson for New Orleans Public Schools. That’s 40 more state-funded seats than the district offered last year, but still more than 200 fewer than it offered in the 2020-21 school year. City residents also fund pre-k seats through a special property tax.
The district recognizes that the supply of state-funded pre-k seats does not meet demand, Alfonzo said. (About one in six 4-year-olds in New Orleans who qualify for a seat don’t have one, data from Agenda for Children show.)
“We continue to collaborate with the Louisiana Department of Education, local providers, and community partners to advocate for additional high-quality early childhood seats and expand access for New Orleans families,” Alfonzo wrote in a statement to The Lens.
In the U.S., Colorado, Florida, Oklahoma, Vermont and the District of Columbia offer universal pre-k programs. Eight other states have programs with universal eligibility, open to 4-year-olds from any family of any income.
In Louisiana, LA 4 has received wide support since its implementation in 2001, but experts say it excludes families who are not technically low-income but also do not make enough money to pay for a tuition-based pre-k program. (Families making above 200% of the federal poverty level — less than $60,000 annually for a family of four — don’t qualify for LA 4 seats.)
In addition to the families who would benefit from free pre-k but don’t qualify, there are hundreds of 4-year-olds in New Orleans who do qualify for publicly funded seats but don’t have one due to the lack of supply.
New Orleans only serves about 84% of 4-year-olds from low-income families, compared with the statewide average of 92%, said Falgoust, of Agenda for Children.
Because of the shortage, many children in New Orleans are entering kindergarten without necessary skills, and hundreds of families are not able to work as much as they want to, or at all, creating economic hardship, she said.
The barriers are connected, because poverty can decrease a child’s readiness for school, through stress, poor nutrition and limited access to educational tools, Falgoust said.
“There’s virtually no area of child wellbeing where being low income is not correlated with negative outcomes,” Falgoust said.
Children who attend high-quality pre-k, research shows, see immediate effects with improved child literacy and school success, but the effects also continue later in life, when those who went through a strong pre-k have a higher chance of finishing high school and owning a home in the future.
