Skip to main content
Multnomah County has said for months that Preschool for All created 1,400 new publicly funded seats this school year. But upon questioning by WW, the county conceded it actually funded only 1,200 of those seats.
Seven classrooms in East Portland offer publicly funded preschool to kids with special needs, and offer very cheap preschool rates (at most $32 a month) for families who want to send their neurotypical kids to an integrated classroom that includes children with special needs.
Jeanett Sealy, the program director of these Multnomah Early Childhood Program classrooms, says the preschool landscape has shifted in recent years—due to COVID-19 and school districts adding classrooms (mostly through Preschool for All)—making it harder for her program to find families who want half-day slots for their neurotypical kids.
It was, in simple terms, a matter of competition, although Sealy doesn’t describe it that way.
So this year, MECP and Preschool for All forged a deal: The county would find 200 neurotypical kids to place in Sealy’s classrooms—but it wouldn’t pay for those slots. Instead, a reserve fund built up from years of parents’ monthly fees to MECP would fund the 200 seats this year.
But the county still included those 200 seats—which existed prior to Preschool for All and weren’t funded by the program—among the 1,400 publicly funded seats that PFA claimed to have created this year. So although PFA funded only 1,200 seats this year, county officials did not divulge that fact until WW pressed them.
The county defends its accounting.
“Preschool for All is directly funding 1,200 of its 1,400 slots this year, but we think that’s missing the point,” county spokesman Ryan Yambra says. “The program committed to almost 1,400 slots this year and that’s what they delivered. The MECP slots are PFA slots. They were embedded within the PFA family application system, and we have the same expectations of MECP with these slots as we do with all our other slots.”
However, MECP’s Sealy tells WW, only 143 of the 200 slots set aside for Preschool for All kids are currently occupied. Fifty-seven of the slots that the county agreed to fill remain vacant.
It’s unclear whether the county knew about these vacancies before WW pointed them out. “In the summer, the county and MECP agreed that any unfilled slots would be returned beginning Nov. 1,” Yambra says. “We anticipate returning just under 60 slots.…The county was aware that vacancies would likely play a role in this partnership from the beginning.”
Next year, the county says, it intends to fund all 200 of those slots. (They will also turn into full-day slots.)
The county’s figures for how many Preschool for All seats were new also shifted dramatically as WW inched closer to publication.
For four weeks, the county told WW it had created 350 entirely new seats. Five days before publication, that number changed to 435. Two days before publication, and one day after a searing Oregonian story about Vega Pederson’s fraught first 10 months in office, the county upped that number again, this time to 507.
The county says the first miscalculation was due to an incomplete pull of data. The second, it says, was a matter of human error.
“Now that we’ve done a more thorough and comprehensive double-check of our data and calculations,” Yambra says, “we’re confident what we share today is accurate information.”
Read our cover story: Multnomah County’s big plans for universal preschool have so far produced pint-sized results.