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A small team of clinicians dedicated to providing early childhood mental health programming for Multnomah County’s Preschool for All program could be eliminated in the upcoming fiscal year.
The proposal is buried in the county’s health department budget transmittal letter for fiscal year 2027. These letters are submitted by department heads every year and “formally convey” budget proposals to the county chair and broader community, according to the county’s website. They are, however, just the first step in a budget process that is still ongoing—the county is trying to patch a $10.5 million gap in the general fund this year. That means proposals such as these might undergo significant change before the County Board of Commissioners approves the final budget.
The county budgeted about $2 million in the current fiscal year to the clinical team, which is meant to include seven mental health clinicians and three related support positions. But the team isn’t subject to the general fund budget crunch. Instead, it’s been funded entirely through the Preschool for All Program Fund, which had banked close to $610 million at the end of fiscal year 2025.
“These proposed cuts are devastating and confusing,” Aimee Griffin, a program specialist with the Preschool for All mental health team, told county commissioners at a March 5 board meeting. (At that meeting, Griffin emphasized she was speaking from a personal capacity.) “One cut is not a budget cut issue, with Preschool for All sitting on a $600 million surplus and still eliminating our services.”
Ryan Yambra, a spokesman with the county, says the change is not one driven by available funding. Instead, Yambra says the proposed change was a data-driven effort to better align program services with provider needs. The county’s Department of Preschool and Early Learning meets with providers regularly and collects end-of-year reports, he says.
Using that information, Yambra says there’s been “a growing need for more intensive, individualized mental health services across our sites.”
That work is different from the chief tasks of the mental health team now in jeopardy, whose members are either involved in prevention or in culturally-specific treatment. That means everything from consulting with preschool educators about best practices in the classroom to conducting mental health screenings and providing case management services. “A hallmark of this program is Spanish-speaking staff and African American culturally specific counseling and parent support services provided to families throughout Multnomah County,” the county’s adopted budget for the current year reads.
In that adopted budget, county officials noted that they were “dramatically increasing” the size of the team, and hoped to nearly double the number of children receiving prevention services, from 2,100 to 4,000.
“The COVID-19 pandemic continues to dramatically impact our entire community, including young children, making this investment incredibly urgent, now that babies born during the pandemic are now entering preschool,” it reads. “The prevention, treatment and early intervention services provided to young children and their families address mental health and developmental needs before they become escalated.”
A year later, the county is considering eliminating the team tasked with addressing those needs.
The proposed cut comes even as Preschool for All providers have long described a need for more to be done on the front-end to prepare them to provide good care to their students. At a Jan. 27 County Commission meeting, Tammy Hamamoto, the preschool program integration site coordinator for Escuela Viva, spoke of some “significant gaps” that set classrooms up for failure on day one.
At that meeting, Hamamoto said that because preschool providers often receive little information about where the children they are serving are coming from developmentally, they are effectively blind to how to support the child behaviorally or otherwise accommodate their needs.
“Providers lose teachers because the demands do not match the program’s capabilities and sometimes children and staff get hurt,” they said. “Without consistent proactive information sharing, classrooms remain in a reactive mode that strains children or strains teachers and destabilizes learning environments.”
The proposed cuts also come as Preschool for All plans to double its seats in the upcoming academic year, in no small part by contracting with dozens of providers new to the universal program.
In its proposal, the county is betting that it can improve results by moving away from these early-intervention clinicians and proceeding with a contractor sent to preschools where kids arrive troubled.
Yambra says he does not anticipate that services would “change substantially”, noting the program will continue offering things including coaching and professional development. He says there is a pressing need to prioritize crisis response, and that the early learning department is “requesting a procurement process to identify a provider who can deliver intensive, individualized services for children with higher mental health needs.”
If the need is high, and Preschool for All’s reserves are stacked deep, why not try both approaches? Yambra adds Preschool for All is anticipating its reserves will lower dramatically this year.
“We are expanding preschool seats and serving a greater number of families across the community,” he says. “This planned increase in spending is part of a longstanding policy to ensure sustainable growth for future generations.”
