Bill > S267

This bill establishes a High Quality Pre-Kindergarten Education grant program, administered by the department of early education and care in collaboration with the department of elementary and secondary education, to fund pre-kindergarten programs for children aged 2 years and 9 months up to kindergarten eligibility, aiming to reduce the achievement gap and improve third-grade reading scores by investing in a high-quality, mixed-delivery early education system. To be eligible for these grants, applicants must meet numerous requirements, including implementing a student tracking system, maintaining a low child-to-instructor ratio (no more than 10:1), actively engaging families, ensuring qualified teachers with ongoing professional development, offering full school-day programs, limiting class sizes to 20 students, including children with disabilities, providing salaries and benefits for instructional staff comparable to K-12 staff in similar districts, using developmentally and linguistically appropriate instruction and evidence-based curricula, ensuring access and accommodations for all children, aligning learning environments with state early learning standards, offering on-site or accessible comprehensive services, partnering with community providers, adhering to health and safety standards, establishing implementation timelines, and implementing program evaluation and data collection systems for continuous improvement, along with describing the learning environment, physical structures, and a teacher evaluation and professional improvement program. The bill also outlines a phased approach for awarding grants over five years, prioritizing districts designated as underperforming or chronically underperforming in the first year, followed by districts with specific accountability rankings and third-grade reading proficiency scores in subsequent years, with the final year focusing on districts with high accountability rankings.