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Portland in 2023 is a worker’s economy. Because employers are desperate for workers, job searchers have their pick—and the child care industry is no exception.
Enter into this market Preschool for All, a new program that requires its providers to pay teachers between $19.91 and $37 an hour. (The average Oregon child care worker is paid $13.39 an hour.) Preschool for All proponents knew that handsome pay was necessary to create a robust and stable preschool system.
But it also creates a system where Preschool for All-funded classrooms are a temptation for teachers who already have jobs—especially those working for publicly funded programs that serve extremely poor families, like Head Start.
Indeed, Head Start is a federal program that serves the poorest families. To qualify for Oregon Head Start, a family of four must make $30,000 or less per year. A similar state-funded program called Preschool Promise serves families living at or below 200% of the poverty line.
Preschool for All intends to serve the middle swath of families: families not poor enough to qualify for Head Start, but too poor to pay—at least comfortably—for private preschool. In the program’s first year, 82% of the program’s preschoolers came from families who made 350% or less of the federal poverty level, which amounts to $105,000 annually for a family of four.
The concern is that a program serving families with modest incomes could siphon classrooms and teachers from programs serving the poorest families.
Read our cover story: Multnomah County’s big plans for universal preschool have so far produced pint-sized results.
Four Head Start programs operate in Multnomah County. WW spoke to the leaders of all four. Three of those leaders said Preschool for All had no negative impact on their program. In fact, for some, it had helped.
But in Gresham, Dr. Hilda Pena-Alfaro tells a different tale. Pena-Alfaro is the director of the Head Start program at Mt. Hood Community College.
“The intent of the program was so good. But the impact is that we’re competing,” Pena-Alfaro said in a September interview with WW. “And we shouldn’t compete. We have the same goal.”
Pena-Alfaro offered an example: Head Start for years leased five classrooms in the David Douglas School District to serve about 100 preschoolers. But this spring, the school district said it would be taking those classrooms back—David Douglas would receive $2.1 million from Preschool for All to support seven classrooms and 126 preschoolers.
The school district disputes Pena-Alfaro’s characterization. “David Douglas did not take any classrooms away from Head Start,” says spokeswoman Aidé Juárez Valerio. “Head Start was unable to staff the five classrooms returning from the pandemic due to staffing shortages.”
Head Start has struggled to retain teachers. This year, Pena-Alfaro’s program has funding for 885 kids but only has enough teachers to serve 441.
Pena-Alfaro and Nancy Perin, executive director of the Oregon Head Start Association, said in the September interview that a number of their teachers left for better pay at Preschool for All. A letter written by Head Start teachers this spring would suggest there is, indeed, a temptation.
“We love our job and the work we do, but we need to support our families and ourselves,” an unspecified number of teachers wrote to Head Start leaders in June, one week after attending an early childhood learning conference where Preschool for All set up a booth advertising teacher salaries.
“We hope that MHCC Head Start values its employees like the Preschool for All Program does,” they wrote. “We are afraid our co-workers will continue to leave us and we will struggle even more so to provide the high-quality care we strive to give our kids and families.”
After the WW interview with Pena-Alfaro and Perin, Mt. Hood Community College administrators stepped in to take over communications—and appeared to backtrack. The administrators said they “were able to move the families” who had been served by the David Douglas classrooms “to other locations.”
One possible reason why: The college itself is a major Preschool for All contractor. In the program’s first fiscal year, MHCC was granted $4.4 million (it spent only $2.4 million of that); this year, it’s budgeted to receive $4.7 million.
College administrators also wrote that they “have no data” linking the Head Start staffing shortages to Preschool for All. County spokesman Ryan Yambra wrote, “Since those remarks, Mt. Hood leadership has apologized to the county for mischaracterizing the current situation.”
Perin says she stands by her statements about Preschool for All wooing away Head Start teachers.
“Competition for teachers is real,” Perin says, adding that “Preschool for All and Head Start do compete for the same children.”
Vega Pederson says she has not spoken with any Head Start directors since the start of the program about its possible effects.