Orange County Schools considers adding three new pre-K classrooms

The Orange County Schools Board of Education might add three new pre-K classrooms. The board discussed the proposal at several meetings last week, including a joint meeting with the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools Board of Education on Friday, Jan. 17.

“Parents are asking for this,” Board member Matthew Roberts said in a meeting on Monday, Jan. 13.

Orange County Schools has allocated six classrooms for pre-K students in four schools. Combined, these classrooms serve 90 children, 20 of whom are students in the special education department. 

According to Orange County Schools data, the district enrolled just under 40 percent of eligible pre-K students who applied last year. Out of 137 applicants, the district admitted 52 and placed the remaining 85 on the waiting list. By comparison, North Carolina’s pre-K program enrolled 47 percent of all eligible children.

“The number of applicants each year is going up, yet each year we’re saying, ‘Nope! We’re not expanding it,’” Roberts said. “I’m really pushing that we need to find out how to expand this and meet what the parents are asking for.”

Chief Academic Officer of Orange County Schools Michele Woodson said supplying three new pre-K classrooms alone would cost the county $618,000. She said that doesn’t include facility costs. 

But Woodson said three more classrooms would allow the district to better serve its students and reduce the waiting list.

“They’d have more opportunity to be exposed to the school environment, and we would be working more closely toward closing that opportunity gap,” she said.

While three new classrooms would reduce waiting lists, OCS board members agreed that Orange County’s pre-K problems need a more permanent solution, such as incorporating pre-K students into population counts.

Schools Adequate Public Facilities Memorandum of Understanding (SAPFO) is a memorandum that governs when the county must build new schools, but it's based on the total population of K-12 students.

If the number of incoming students exceeds the class sizes set out in the agreement, the county must build a new school to accommodate them. 

The current agreement does not count pre-K children.

OCS Board Chairperson Will Atherton said Orange County schools are becoming too full, and since SAPFO doesn’t count pre-K students, redistricting discussions might not either. 

“This is where we could be forced to remove pre-K to accommodate capacity in our schools,” he said in the Jan. 13 meeting. “This is why it matters.”

Repeating this in the joint board meeting on Jan. 17, Atherton said the alternative may be providing pre-K through third parties.

“I am not a supporter of outsourcing pre-K at all,” he said, adding that privatized pre-K programs neither share a common curriculum nor provide exposure to the school environment as public pre-K does.

Several other board members agreed, including Stephen Halkiotis.

"Don't let anyone force you into private, universal pre-K," he said.

Atherton said county commissioners have hesitated to count pre-K students in the SAPFO agreement because it would stretch the county’s finances. Counting pre-K children now would force the district to build a new school in four years, he told both boards on Jan. 17. 

Halkiotis said he thinks the county commissioners need to agree to the amendment because pre-K is too important.

“We’re not asking for anybody to go out and build two more schools immediately,” Halkiotis said. “We’re asking them to recognize that we got a situation here that needs to be recognized. Stop denying these kids don’t exist. They exist. They’re here. Count them.”

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