The interim committee charged with finding a way to implement full-day kindergarten classes at all Arizona public schools recommended that students be phased in to the longer classes over five years, with priority for low-income families.

Finding a way to pay the program’s estimated cost, $200 million-plus, will be up to the Legislature next session and is expected to spark a battle.

Republican lawmakers who say the state cannot afford the program are expected to fight funding.

“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Sen. Bob Burns, R-9, and co-chair of the Joint Legislative Study Committee on Full Day Kindergarten, said at the committee’s Nov. 29 meeting. “The fact that we might be in a little better shape [now] than last time doesn’t make what we did last time right.

“We need to get back to a balanced budget and our responsibility to our taxpayers.”

Of the six legislators on the committee, two, Mr. Burns and Sen.-elect Linda Gray, R-10, voted against the recommendations. Three others voted in favor — Sens. Linda Aguirre, D-16, and Toni Hellon, R-26, and Rep. Linda Lopez, D-29. The sixth, Rep. Warde Nichols, R-21, was not present. Governor Napolitano has three appointees on the commission, and all three voted yes, so the final vote was 6-2.

Ms. Napolitano said she was not surprised to hear that some lawmakers say the state doesn’t have enough money to fund the kindergarten program.

“The legislators I know of who have been making those comments couldn’t find money for education and all-day kindergarten when the state was flush,” she said. “There’s always a reason, but the plain fact of the matter is that…the commission that the Legislature itself established recommended the funding and the continued expansion of it over a five-year period.”

The governor said her office is still working on a funding amount to continue full-day kindergarten.

The committee recommendation that 20 per cent of students will be phased in to the program each year over a five-year period will reduce the burden on individual schools and districts as well as on the state, said Debra Bergman, principal at Gallego Basic Elementary School in Tucson, and one of the governor’s appointees to the committee.

Dr. Mark Tregaskes, superintendent of the Safford Unified School District and another of the governor’s appointees, said a phase-in also would allow schools to plan staff needs in advance and would save schools from having to hire more teachers in any one given year.

It was recommended that funding be based on current student projection formula used by the state and that the number of students in a school’s free- and reduced-cost lunch program be used to prioritize the phase-in.

To provide adequate funding for schools that will lack classroom space when full-day kindergarten begins, the committee recommended kindergartners should be considered full-time students in the School Facilities Board’s formula for school construction and expansion.

As a way of providing accountability for student improvement, the committee also recommended diagnostic assessments be designed for kindergarten through second grade.

Another recommendation is that the state require kindergarten teachers to be trained to recognize and solve learning problems. The commission also recommended that the state Education Department work with colleges of education to build kindergarten teaching standards into teaching curriculums.

Joint Legislative Budget Committee staff presented options to reduce or eliminate 10 education appropriations that would provide $76.1 million that could be used to fund full-day kindergarten. The options included not allowing a school with declining enrollment to receive state funds based on higher student counts from the previous year and eliminating a family literacy program designed to increase the basic academic and literacy skills of parents and their preschool children.

Hellon: Look At Entire Budget

Sen. Hellon, who will chair the Senate’s new K-12 Education Committee next year, said money for full-day kindergarten need not come only from other education appropriations.

“We have to look at the entire budget,” she said, “and hopefully that’s what the Legislature will do.”

Mr. Burns, who is chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said funding for any new program can only occur if other programs are reduced and money is reallocated, because the Legislature only works “with a small piece of clay” because 64 per cent of the state’s $7.29 billion is mandated by spending formulas.

“Reduction and elimination of programs is almost non-existent [at the Legislature],” he said. “Until that mindset changes, I don’t see how we can create new programs. We have to look at this reallocating. We have to talk about the fact that we can’t to everything for everybody.”

Sen.-elect Gray, the interim committee’s other co-chair, said there are not enough funds available to begin any new programs, especially in light of the increased retirement costs for teachers. She said that if the money must be spent on education, she would rather it be spent on raises for teachers or programs that benefit the entire K-12 system.

“A new program is not fair to the rest of the teachers,” said Ms. Gray, who will chair a new committee, Higher Education, in the Senate next year.

David Braswell, a Glendale Union High School District board member and one of the governor’s appointees on the committee, said the effects of full-day kindergarten stay with a student until graduation and funding shouldn’t be used as an excuse for not implementing the program.

“That might place my child in a situation where my child will live the rest of his life and not get a diploma,” Mr. Braswell said. “We need to give serious consideration to the preparation and funding we’re allowing our teachers to access for developing our children to meet the standards the Legislature set up.”—