Under orders from the DOE to provide free full-day preschool to about 600 3-and 4-year olds, the Berkeley Board of Education has asked administrators to figure out how much it will cost, reports The Asbury Park Press. The Board of this K-6, 4-school district in Ocean County is looking for an estimate that includes the required transportation and facilities (though the system doesn’t have enough school buses to transport the children, nor does it have the room). The Board has this question for the DOE, which promised last year to pay for the programs and then reneged:

“We want to know that the state will fund preschool for five years,” board President James Byrnes said at Thursday’s board meeting. “We don’t want to start the program up, hire teachers and then find out there’s no state money for the program after the first year.”

Let’s do the math. The State has estimated the cost per pupil at between $11,205 and $12,596 per year. (DOE guidelines appropriately limit classes to 15 kids with one teacher and an aide.) So the total cost per year for Berkeley with its 600 eligible youngsters is somewhere between $6,723,000 and $7,557,600 per year, not including additional school buses or facilities. Berkeley has a fairly reasonable total cost per pupil of $13,751 (remember this is N.J.) so we’ll estimate their total budget at about $27,000,000. Therefore, providing full-day preschool will increase Berkeley’s budget by 26%.

Berkeley School District has a District Factor Grouping of “B,” which means that the State gives it the second lowest socio-economic rating. A is the poorest; J is the wealthiest. Corzine’s new School Funding Reform Act, which supplants the Abbott decisions as the school funding mechanism for N.J., mandates that each child living in poverty, whether he or she lives in an impoverished urban area or not, be given the “Abbott extras,” i.e., after-school programs, summer sessions, tutoring, and full-day preschool. That’s how Berkeley ends up having to provide free preschool to 600 kids.

Free public preschools for poor kids is a magnificent idea. The problem in New Jersey is the price per kid. The National Institution for Early Education Research (NIEER) has a data base of preschool information, and N.J.’s cost per pupil is number 1 in the country: $10,989. Here’s the cost per pupil in surrounding states: Pennsylvania: $6,252; New York: $3,948; Connecticut: $9,393 (second highest); Delaware: $6,795; Massachusetts: $3,811. Averaged out across the states that offer preschool, we pay more than twice as much per child.

It’s unsustainable, especially in a state buffeted by falling housing values, retreat of businesses, and enormous debt. But Corzine has to go ahead with it or he’ll violate his hard-won School Funding Reform Act, which he touts as one of the biggest accomplishments of his administration.

Can it work? Can we provide free preschool to all poor kids regardless of where they live? Not if we pay twice as much and not if we insist on having each of our 600 districts create classrooms and programming independently. The only financially feasible option is to make preschools county-wide and find ways to cut the costs. Make it the bailiwick of our new Executive County Superintendents and let them look for efficiencies of scale. Does it have to be full-day (especially since some districts in N.J. have ½ day kindergartens)? Can we create partnerships with local teaching colleges to provide teacher interns? How about county-wide charter preschools?

The only way to make the math work – if it can work at all – is if we wrench ourselves from the bejeweled box of local governance. Although, of course, you could say the same thing for our kindergarten-12th grades too.