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Preschool for All currently has more provider seats than it has student applicants, Multnomah County announced Thursday. That means that while the county will have a seat for every student who’s applied, it will need 1,000 more to match the provider seats it has confirmed.
The county has received more than 6,000 applications for the 2026–27, more than 4,500 of which are new applications, says spokesman Ryan Yambra. He says the county has confirmed 7,100 seats, which indicates the county currently has more seats than it has applicants.
“We are thrilled that we will have so many more seats for families next school year,” Yambra says. “We have enough preschool seats for every child who has applied. Family choice is a key element of Preschool for All, and that will determine where our final numbers land.”
The number of student applications is up significantly from the 2025–26 school year, when the universal preschool initiative received 3,383 new applications.
But the demand for preschool seats—about 6,000 applications—still appears to be well below the supply: 7,100 seats.
Yambra says the county expects to enroll nearly all available seats in the upcoming year, through a secondary application period beginning June 16.
“To be clear, our enrollment period has not yet begun and we don’t have a number of ‘unfilled’ seats to report as this is an ongoing process that could continue into October,” he says.
The number of seats available in Preschool for All in the upcoming school year is well-ahead of goalposts the county had established in recent years for the program. Yet recent demographic numbers around 3 and 4-year-olds in the county have raised questions about whether Preschool for All will actually need to create 11,000 seats by 2030. That’s because those numbers, as some analysis done for the program’s Technical Advisory Group had concluded, were way down. Demographic modeling presented to that group suggested the county may only need to cover 7,568 seats to reach universal status.
That’s just one question that commissioners and the county’s Preschool and Early Learning Department are weighing as the program moves toward universal status. The Board of County Commissioners on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution supporting the county department in its conducting of a Universal Preschool Gap Analysis.
“[Preschool for All] is in its final stages of growth…the last seats are the hardest ones [to fill],” said commissioner Julia Brim-Edwards. “When we talk about the gap analysis, the gap is between current enrollment and achieving universal preschool.”
The analysis includes four phases meant for completion by the end of the year. The first phase, which has been completed, includes analysis of geographic distribution of applicants and census data for demographic information. (The demographic information from phase one was not immediately available.)
The second phase will analyze additional quantitative data including waitlist information and information about other publicly funded programs. The third phase, which will take place over summer, will focus on qualitative data from families who turned down a Preschool for All seat. The fourth phase will use the analysis from the first three phases to inform allocations for the 2027–28 school year.
“As we get closer to universal, our priorities of growth have shifted,” Danisa McLean, the program’s director, told commissioners Thursday. “We will have to be intentional in these next few years in really honing in on the opportunities to continue to honor family choice, which also means offering opportunities where there are locations that families can access, a variety of different settings, and a variety of different hours along with curriculum and languages that are offered to those families.”
