St. Paul, MN - Today, the House Early Childhood Finance and Policy Committee advanced legislation to permanently invest in 4,000 of Minnesota’s voluntary pre-K slots.
“All of our youngest learners deserve the best possible start,” said Rep. Connie Bernardy (DFL-New Brighton), chief author of the legislation. “Making this funding permanent is one of the best investments we can make for our state.”
The Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) program began in 2017 as one way to provide prekindergarten education services to students who are not yet enrolled in kindergarten. The VPK program divides the state into four regions and awards seats and funding for the program to school district and charter school sites based on each site’s percentage of free and reduced-price lunch eligible kindergarten students.
The initial funding for the program was sufficient to fund seats for 3,160 four-year-old students on an ongoing basis. In the following year, another 4,000 seats were added to the VPK program and a second program style, called School Readiness Plus (SRP) was created, although most of these newly qualified sites continue to use the VPK model. These 4,000 seats were initially added for two years only. The legislature renewed these seats in 2019 for two years, and again during the 2021 session, the seats were extended for another two years but are due to expire after 2023. H.F. 2655 makes these additional 4,000 seats permanent for 2024 and beyond.
The bill advanced out of committee and now awaits a hearing in the House K-12 Education Finance Committee.
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