New York City offers free preschool. So why are 30,000 spots empty?

Cruz’s niece told her about a preschool option that could give Maylin a place to go while her mom works: The city’s free program for 3-year-olds, open to children regardless of immigration status. But Cruz worried about enrolling without having legal documents for Maylin on hand, and ultimately opted not to send her.

“For now, she just walks around with me all morning,” Cruz, 38, said in Spanish.

When New York City began its universal preschool program for 4-year-olds in 2014, it was tough not to notice. Outreach workers fanned out six days a week across barbershops and laundromats. They pitched the program at 500 community events. They called 130,000 families to address concerns they may have had about preschool. They spent afternoons knocking door-to-door at public housing complexes and held pop-up fairs at homeless shelters.

Looking to build on the success of pre-K, the city widened its goal in 2017, aiming to expand the initiative to 3-year-olds and starting off in a handful of neighborhoods.

Several years later, after the pandemic devastated the early childhood sector, causing day care providers and preschools to close in droves, families became desperate for affordable child care. The city now has plenty of it: almost 130,000 free and low-cost prekindergarten seats for 3- and 4-year-olds.

But nearly 30,000 of those seats remain empty.

‘Failing at outreach’

By some measures, the program’s enrollment looks promising: More than 42,000 New York City children have applied for 3-K in the coming school year.

That’s an all-time high, in part because the city has significantly expanded the 3-K program since it began. Still, even if every applicant was offered a spot, roughly a quarter of the seats would still go unfilled.

Early childhood advocates say more families would likely sign up if they knew about the benefits of preschool and did not face barriers to enrollment.

They say another intensive push modeled on the first, successful outreach campaign is needed to fill more seats. Otherwise, a central mission of the initiatives – to serve the high-needs families who stand to benefit most from high-quality early childhood education – could be jeopardized.

Several areas with the highest rates of vacant seats are among the city’s poorest, including Brownsville, East Harlem and several neighborhoods in the southwest Bronx, data shows.

And the pre-K enrollment rate for 4-year-olds living in homeless shelters has dropped since the pandemic began – from nearly two-thirds to about 50 percent.

Education officials say they have sent robocalls and emails to roughly 100,000 families with reminders and targeted information, and directly called nearly 7,600 parents.

They have also advertised in several languages on social media, on the subway and at businesses in low-turnout areas, as well as answered questions at local events and information sessions.

But the department no longer does frequent, on-the-ground canvassing.

‘Doesn’t seem possible’

Across the country, enrollment in public preschool programs plunged during the pandemic, as preschools closed or went remote, and some families worried about sending unvaccinated children to classrooms, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

The largest declines were among the lowest-income families, whose enrollment has rebounded at a slower pace.

In New York City, one reason there are fewer children attending free preschool could be simply that there are fewer children overall. (The city’s birthrate – already on the decline – fell by nearly 9 percent between 2019 and 2020, hitting a historic low.)

But some elected officials maintain the problem is bigger than demographics alone.

“So many working parents depend on 3-K,” said Shekar Krishnan, a councilman who represents Jackson Heights and Elmhurst in Queens. “It just logically doesn’t seem possible that the vacancies cannot be filled.”

Said Daniel Weisberg, the first deputy chancellor with the New York City Department of Education: “One possibility is there’s not enough outreach being done, and I take that as a possibility.

“But if we have the highest application rate on record and it’s not even getting close to the capacity that we built, that’s a problem.”

In the meantime, other cities that provide free public preschool have renewed their focus on outreach as enrollment gaps have persisted.

‘Personalized touch’

In Chicago, the pandemic inspired officials to “really change” their approach, said Leslie Mckinily, who runs the district’s early childhood efforts. They ramped up street canvassing to reach families in hard hit ZIP codes and left preschool pamphlets directly outside homes. Officials began biweekly meetings to map out areas in need of additional attention.

In Dallas, a new neighborhood-level campaign began two years ago that includes knocking on doors to find eligible children. Many canvassers have had to address families’ new concerns over preschool enrollment.

But raising awareness may not be a panacea: Even parents eager to sign up can struggle to navigate the application process.

As the search for solutions continues, workers who helped the city enroll a mass of families years ago, like Jasmine Fernández, who worked on the original “Pre-K for All” outreach team, said the city needs to “go back to the basics.”

“We can send emails, we can do the robocalls. But that’s not that personalized touch,” said Fernández, who left the department in 2019.

“And I think that’s the difference.”

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