Michele Biller runs the Garcia Street Club preschool in Santa Fe, which lost a third of its income due to state budget cuts.
On a sunny Friday, Michele Biller, director of Garcia Street Club, is hunched over a laptop in the preschool’s hushed foyer. The occasional shriek of joy filters in from the playground, but Biller’s brow is furrowed: She’s trying to find a way to help parents understand how much more they’ll have to pay since the school lost state funding. She’s trying to find a way to help low-income families who relied on state subsidies for tuition here to keep their kids in preschool. As of July 1, a third of Biller’s entire budget will be gone, and she’s scrambling.
“We’ve lost $8,700 a month,” Biller says gravely. “We’re just going to have to figure out a way to keep the doors open.”
It took the
New Mexico
state Legislature two special sessions and plenty of heated arguments to arrive at a state budget that combined sweeping cuts with new taxes to (mostly) close the state’s yawning budget deficit. Generally, agencies on the receiving end of state budget cuts are left to figure out how to trim their own budget, CYFD Communications Director Romaine Serna tells
SFR
. With CYFD, part of that process involved eliminating a $1.5 million Early Childhood Development grant (also called the Focused Portfolio grant).
Organizations like Garcia Street that rely on the grant for staffing, operations and especially for providing cheaper services to low-income families are struggling to fill the gaps.
Biller didn’t learn of the cuts until April, when a letter from CYFD informed her that the Early Childhood Development Program—under which Garcia Street had a five-year contract to receive $107,157 annually from CYFD—would be eliminated. Twelve other organizations suffered similar cuts.
Early Childhood Development funding is one of several state-sponsored preschool programs, and its cost per child—$3,854—is on the upper end for early childhood programs in
New Mexico
. (Head Start dwarfs them all with a whopping cost of $7,822 per child.) The program differs in its approach by requiring educators to conduct frequent assessments of a child’s progress and development.
“It’s prevention,” Victoria Pruitt, the director of St. Mark’s in the Valley Day School, an Albuquerque preschool with a student population that’s 50 percent low-income, explains. Pruitt says the Focused Portfolio system helps catch learning disabilities early so children aren’t disadvantaged throughout their educational careers.
“The sad thing is, we set our kids up for failure [when] we don’t do the prevention,” Pruitt says. St. Mark’s lost $78,685 in grant money, but Pruitt says the school will continue to employ the Focused Portfolio methods—just without the benefit of state funds.
Other schools don’t have that luxury. Biller says Garcia Street’s Early Childhood Development grant represents approximately one-third of the school’s entire budget.
“Essentially, we’re taking away from the diversity of our program,” Biller tells
SFR
. The worst part, she says, is that the whole thing came as a surprise.
Serna, meanwhile, says CYFD isn’t the only agency responsible.
“CYFD did not make a decision to eliminate this grant in isolation,” Serna writes in an email, referring
SFR
to a 2009 Legislative Finance Committee report. “The Legislature weighed in heavily on this decision,” she writes.
Indeed: Last May, LFC analysts submitted a report to CYFD Cabinet Secretary Dorian Dodson. The report describes the state’s
Early
Childhood Development Program as “duplicative” because it overlaps with public pre-Kindergarten (NM PreK) and federal and state Head Start programs. Toward the end of their report, the analysts recommend that CYFD “phase out…the state
Early
Childhood Development Program in FY11.” That’s exactly what CYFD is doing—if less as a phaseout than as a closeout. What’s lacking is the second half of the LFC’s recommendation: “Begin working with providers to transition children as appropriate to other funding sources in FY10.”
Serna says most organizations that receive state funding are cognizant of the budget cycle: “That calendar is not a secret to anyone.”
Even so, other administrators were just as taken aback as Biller was—like Janet Aboytes, the coordinator for the Teen Parent Center at Santa Fe High School, which lost $116,075 in Early Childhood grant money. Aboytes says she follows budget dealings at the state Legislature closely and often calls lawmakers to check the status of CYFD grants. This year, Aboytes says, “They said there would be a cut, [but] the most it could be, they said, was 5 percent.” Even through the Legislature’s special budget session in March, Aboytes says, the line was always the same: Expect cuts.
As a result, Aboytes says, “We were expecting a 5, at the most maybe 10 percent cut—but completely wiped out? Nobody thought that.”
Like Biller, Aboytes is searching high and low for alternative sources of income.
“I’m writing grants like crazy, talking to donors, looking at fundraising,” Aboytes says. Her time crunch may be even worse than Biller’s, too, since the Teen Parent Center only operates during the school year.
“The most devastating part is that [the cut] came at the end of April,” Aboytes says. “What can we do in a month? We’re still shocked.”
Rex Davidson, the director of Las Cum-bres Community Services, an organization that provides health and development care to low-income infants and children in Española and Santa Fe, says he too followed the state budget closely but “this particular cut took us by surprise.”
Davidson says they knew cuts were coming, but thought they would be mitigated by earmarks toward early childhood programs from the cigarette tax increase. Those earmarks were vetoed by Gov. Bill Richardson, who cited budget concerns and directed income from the cigarette tax into the state’s general fund. In a statement at the time, Richardson noted the vetoes were “difficult to make… I have championed early childhood programs throughout my administration. In these times, however, our desire to do good must be balanced against our responsibility to be fiscally responsible.”
Fred Nathan, executive director of Think
New Mexico
, says the non-recurring funds Richardson vetoed would not have been a sustainable means of funding early childhood programs.
“So the governor was put in a difficult position,” Nathan writes in an email. “He could sign this gimmick (one year of funding for expanded early childhood programs designed to give political cover to lawmakers for passing a tax increase) into law or he could veto it and look bad politically for what appears on the surface as opposing early childhood programs.”
In any event, with bleak budget forecasts, the reality of the state’s tax policy is taking its toll on educators as well as students. At Garcia Street, the Scorpions—age groups are named after bugs here—form a raucous line for the playground. After settling a bike dispute and meting out toys among younger children, Debra Dickinson surveys the playground. Slight and middle-aged, Dickinson has been a teacher here for eight years, and she’s open about her concerns.
“It’s really frustrating,” she says of the budget cuts. “It feels as though we’re losing the capacity to serve all the children of Santa Fe—not just those who can afford it.”
That sentiment is echoed by Bill
Jordan
, policy director at
New Mexico
Voices for Children, who says the state “did not invest enough in early childhood programs even when we had money! We took that money and gave tax breaks to rich folks instead of funding health care and education for children.”
Now,
Jordan
says, “It’s tragic that, at a time when the economy’s bad and families are in need, lawmakers are saying, ‘We’re going to cut back your services.’”
