BALTIMORE – At Downtown Baltimore Child Care, 3-year-old Jaylen Robinson emphatically pronounces the letter “O” four times, waving a black-and-white alphabet tile in the air and placing it to spell the word “octopus.” His classmate Layla, also 3, marches down the stairs from the dramatic play area in a bright-red fire hat.

Normally, the center charges $1,800 a month, but Jaylen attends for free through a state-funded prekindergarten expansion grant and a separate, state-funded child care scholarship, in addition to a teacher’s discount that his mom earns for working at the school.

Layla’s mom also receives the pre-K expansion grant, which covers 6.5 hours of school time, and she pays less than $200 for additional hours of “wraparound care” while she’s at work, with help from the child care scholarship and financial aid from the nonprofit child care center on North Arch Street on downtown’s west side.

“It’s amazing. I’m so grateful for it,” said Layla’s mom, Yusra Shireen, who works as a hairstylist and described struggling to make ends meet. “I didn’t want to move her to a different place or school.”

Conceived as part of the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s “mixed-delivery” system for pre-K expansion is designed to offer seats through both public and private providers.

The Blueprint, the state’s landmark education reform plan, aims to make pre-K available to every 3- and 4-year-old in the state. The overall cost of the education initiative is expected to increase to $4.1 billion per year by fiscal 2029, but that could be adjusted or cut because of state budget concerns when the General Assembly meets in January.

For Downtown Baltimore Child Care and other private providers across the state, participating in the pre-K grant program is a challenge.

“It’s administratively complex to partner with the state,” said Hilary Roberts-King, the center’s executive director.

Even the application process was a challenge, Roberts-King said, necessitating grant application assistance. She also noted the paperwork, reporting and observations required by the state, and the difficulty of braiding various sources of public and private funding to serve one child.

“It’s on the provider to add up all these sources of funding to see if we can pay our bills,” she said.

Other private provider concerns include insufficient funds, difficulties applying for grants according to the state’s timeline, and competing with public schools for pre-K slots.

Lawmakers are urging changes in the next legislative session.

“If we don’t do right by us, then there will be no ‘us’ to have the conversation about,” said Del. Aletheia McCaskill, a Baltimore County Democrat, speaking to child care providers at a recent symposium hosted by the Maryland State Child Care Association. McCaskill is the owner and lead teacher at Tender Tots, a child care facility in Gwynn Oak.

Downtown Baltimore Child Care is one of 74 private providers participating in pre-K expansion grants this year, up from 52 last year, Assistant State Superintendent Shayna Cook said at the symposium.

Other private providers say major barriers remain to their participation in the grant program.

For Hilltop Early Learning Center in Clarksville, registration for the next school year opens in February, but the state grant application process opens later in the spring, followed by a wait for application approval.

“I don’t know how to register a program when I wouldn’t be approved for the grant at the time of registration,” said Cortney Cabrera, the center’s assistant director.

Asked about the timeline difficulties, Cook told The Baltimore Sun that the state legislative session doesn’t end until April, meaning there’s no clear budget line item until then. She added that there are efforts to centralize enrollment systems so public schools can make referrals to private providers, helping them fill their seats.

Meanwhile, centers that don’t participate in the state grants could risk losing their enrollees to cost-free seats offered elsewhere.

Last year, First Lutheran Preschool in Ellicott City had no plans to participate in the pre-K expansion grants since staff didn’t have state-required credentials and due to concern that the state grant wouldn’t cover teacher salaries if they were raised to a comparable level with public school salaries, as the program requires.

“We lost a lot of our families to public pre-K,” said Jenny James, the preschool’s director. “Our enrollment was cut down by at least 25%.”

Changes to staff requirements implemented earlier this year by the General Assembly were helpful, James said. The preschool now offers 14 publicly funded pre-K slots, out of 82 total enrollments.

The pre-K expansion grant is set to increase from the current per-pupil amount of $13,000 per year to more than $14,000 next year, and to nearly $20,000 the following year.

“We all know $13,000 is not enough to serve 3- and 4-year-olds,” Cook said. “We’re getting closer to the true cost of care.”

Early childhood education specialist Randi Albertsen raised concern at the symposium about local school systems pushing to open up more seats in public schools.

“You are setting up failure for community-based programs when you put us in direct competition with public schools,” Albertsen said to applause.

Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, a Howard County Democrat who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, responded that the local education agencies managing public schools “should not be pushing for more slots.”

“That is something that we’ll have to address because that was not the intent of the legislation,” she said.

At a Sept. 24 meeting of the Maryland State Board of Education, Carroll County Public Schools Superintendent Cynthia McCabe noted the lack of private providers willing to participate in the mixed delivery of funding and said there’s “growing concern” that local education agencies should provide more conducive environments for private providers.

“While the goal of a mixed-delivery system is laudable, the experience from the last three years of implementing the Blueprint has demonstrated that this is an extraordinary expectation and that perhaps it’s one that could be reconsidered,” McCabe said. “There is very little that [local education agencies] can do to incentivize participation from our private providers. We don’t regulate our private providers.”

Moving forward to the next legislative session, the state could consider focusing pre-K expansion on children “with the most need,” known as “Tier 1” children with a family income of up to 300% of the federal poverty level, said Sen. Mary Beth Carozza, a Republican representing Somerset, Wicomico and Worcester counties and a member of the Senate Education, Energy and the Environment Committee.

“Tier 1” children can attend for free, while “Tier 2” children, with family income between 300% and 600% of the federal poverty level, would be subsidized on a sliding scale, once the program is fully implemented.

Carozza voted against the Blueprint in 2021, due to concern about its costs. Although there are individual pieces of the Blueprint that “we all support,” she said, the cost is “simply unaffordable.”

“You have to be honest with the public of what is doable with the Blueprint at this point, when we’re facing budgetary challenges,” she said.

The reason for expanding via mixed delivery was twofold: concern from private providers about their business viability, and a lack of adequate space in public schools, said Rachel Hise, executive director of the Blueprint’s independent Accountability & Implementation Board.

Speaking at the Sept. 24 meeting, McCabe described Carroll County’s efforts to expand pre-K in elementary schools, noting that the growth of pre-K competes with “existing and long-standing capital improvement priorities to accommodate growing demand and overcrowding at some of our Carroll County schools.”

The state recently adjusted its timeline for mixed delivery, directing that 10% of pre-K expansion slots in each county come from private providers, as opposed to the previous goal of 30%, which was not met by a single county last year. The state will issue an update on private provider enrollments in December, Cook said. Counties that don’t meet the 10% benchmark can apply for a waiver.

The state aims to increase private provider participation by 10% each year until private providers hold 50% or more of the slots in the 2028-2029 school year.

That 50% goal might be out of reach at the moment, Atterbeary said.

“It might be eight years out, 10 years out,” she said, “but we need to get there.”

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