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Multnomah County’s Preschool for All program will open about 240 new midyear seats for the 2025–26 school year, it announced Friday.
The seats, which families can apply for starting Monday, will become available beginning in January 2026. The additional seats were awarded to both new and existing providers, according to a county release.
Preschool for All, the county program trying to provide universal access to the county’s children by 2030, has in its first few years struggled to ramp up capacity as quickly as initially hoped. It still faces a long waitlist and more demand than it has room to accommodate.
“This midyear expansion is an important part of making high-quality preschool accessible for every family in Multnomah County,” Rachel Pearl, interim director of the county’s Preschool and Early Learning Division, said in a statement. “We are thrilled to add hundreds of additional seats with both new and trusted partners, bringing us closer to our goal of universal preschool by 2030.”
Any expansion is good news for the program, which is sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars in reserve and has faced increased scrutiny from the state. But that’s where midyear seats get a little more complicated. That’s because the seats are not meant to dramatically expand capacity.
“The primary goal of adding midyear seats is not necessarily for large-scale expansion twice a year, but rather to make our system more nimble,” says county spokesman Ryan Yambra. “This allows us to utilize new PFA facilities as soon as they are ready, rather than having them wait for the next full enrollment cycle.”
That’s previously been a point of tension for at least a couple of preschool providers, which were rejected from hosting midyear seats in late spring, as reported by WW. At the time, the county told WW it awarded midyear seats to 13 providers, rejecting the other 28 that had applied for seats, raising questions about its urgency to ramp up capacity. (County spokespeople have previously said the regular cycle provides ample opportunity for providers to participate.)
When asked if the midyear seats would hover around the 240 mark in future years, Yambra said the county plans to create midyear seat projections each year to inform budget planning, with the projections for the upcoming fiscal year to come in February. Last year, the county reported about 150 midyear seats.
Even with the new addition of seats, the county will still have more applicants than it has capacity. Yambra says there are currently 940 applicants who, since April, have not received a placement offer. Yambra says those families will be alerted when those seats become available. The assignment is not first-come, first-served.
“Our prioritization process is consistent, regardless of when a family applies,” Yambra says. “The system is designed to prioritize children who currently have the least access to high-quality early learning experiences. When there are more applicants than available seats, offers are made based on priority status, followed by a randomly assigned lottery number.”
