Thomas Lasley: As CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton, I'm interested because some of the most forward-thinking cities in the country have endeavored to do this very same thing.
Q: So on the city side, this is this is the first city income tax increase since…
Nan Whaley: 1984. I was 8.
Q: In the past the city has worked to avoid tax increases and just sought renewals. What’s different now?
Whaley: Several things. First, there's the change in the Local Government Fund, the money the state has traditionally given to cities to help fund operations. It's been deeply reduced in recent years, so cities across Ohio are looking to new funding. In Dayton, we're at the funding levels we were at in the 1998 budget; this issue would raise between $10 and $11 million a year, which is about what the loss in the Local Government Fun has been. So, we saw a shortfall coming. At the same time, we've seen the need to invest in high-quality preschool for our students and community – the idea of investing in our workforce of the future. So the issue is two-fold – current and future.
Q: How would the funds raised be spent?
Whaley: About $7 million a year toward city services, and $4.2 million toward the programs aimed at boosting high-quality pre-kindergarten.
Q: You’ve said that if Issue 9 doesn’t pass, it will mean cuts to the city’s development fund. What does that mean to residents?
Whaley: Well, not just that — we've cut 40 percent of our city workforce since 2001, and most of those of have been central core services that most residents don't see or deal with, such as finance, central services, IT. Next it will mean police, fire, EMS, the workers who really affect quality-of-life issues. The development fund is what lets us compete on keeping and growing jobs in the city, so it will have impact in the long term.
Q: The issue would pay for new police – how many?
Whaley: The plan is to add two officers a year for the eight years of the issue. It's not surprising, but this isn't a particularly fun time to be a police officer, and so our attrition rate is way up. Our officers are just running from priority call to priority call, and we don't have enough to really engage in a real community-based policing model.
Q: Some critics have said the language of the issue doesn’t require you to spend the money the way you say you will – is there a concern that, say, a year from now a different priority could come along and change everything?
Whaley: We've done it the way the state requires for it to be on the ballot, recognizing pre-K education as a bold priority the commission has supported. But I'm up for re-election next year, and I could get beaten; this is my goal and vision for the community, something I care about, and I want to make sure it's protected. So we put it in the general code. To change it would take a two-time vote from the commission, so that citizens would have the opportunity to say, "This is not OK – this is not what was promised." And our citizens let us know what they think.
Q: The city usually stays in a certain lane – it does police, fire, water, roads, the airport, and the like. This would take it into education, a new realm where it doesn’t have a lot of experience. Why is that a good idea?
Whaley: You're right that in the past, the city's role has been public safety and public works. But what we're seeing lately is the issue of the city's workforce – what happens to the long-term viability of a community if it doesn't have a strong, capable workforce? We're finally seeing some movement with downtown redevelopment, job growth, city services – and now we're being asked, "What is your workforce like?" So in 2012, Tom and some other local leaders started to look at education and asked: What is the city's role? There's a lot of disagreement on that, but they argued education was the key to a vibrant community – and that there are places where the larger community needs to step in. I mean, the schools feel as though they have this 24/7 responsibility for their students, but if you look at the things like pre-kindergarten education, after-school programs, summer slide, mentoring and workforce training, most of those are actually the responsibility of the rest of the community – government, business, non-profits. That's where the city needs to step in.
Lasley: It's not happenstance that cities across the state are pursuing similar preschool initiatives. Before Nan was even elected, we went to a National League of Cities meeting, and the cities with more progressive agendas are trying to make sure they have the intellectual capital they'll need for the next-generation jobs we all want to attract. They are all starting to think of an expanded role, mayors thinking outside the box in terms of their responsibilities – respecting and honoring traditional education systems, but also understanding that unless they're more aggressive in things like preschool education, they'll never have the intellectual capital they need. At that time, Louisville even cited Dayton – unfavorably, I'm sorry to say – as a place that was behind on producing the human capital needed for the future.
Q: So if approved, how will the money be administered?
Robyn Lightcap: We will establish a 501(c)(3) to manage the preschool funding and administer the Preschool Promise program, and use contracts for control. Meetings will be open to the public and there will be reports to the community on how we're running. As far as how the funds will be used, we have three pillars as part of the Promise. The first is educating the community – the marketing piece, to make parents, educators, grandparents, caregivers aware of how important high-quality preschool is, how to find it and how to pay for it. Next is really improving quality — defining it and funding it. Third is assisting families in paying for high-quality preschool.
Q: What makes preschool “high quality”?
Lightcap: We work with those that are ready to improve, focusing on teacher training, resources for the classroom, a high-quality curriculum. We make sure programs for students' social and emotional needs are in place, because those are absolutely foundational for learning later on. We consider the family engagement piece, to establish that foundation between parents and the school. We dive into equity needs to address cultural competency to make sure we're representing the different cultures in our community. We look at the continuing education of our teachers – now to work in a community-based preschool you only need a high school diploma; we want to make sure they know how to work with kids using the Child Development Association's special license, and then work toward an associate's degree, a BA and beyond.
Q: Isn’t it one of the challenges that these positions are not well paid, and that once you help teachers get an associate’s degree, they’ll just move to a better-paying district?
Lightcap: We're looking at wages and stipends, and how you can incent someone to stay here and work longer. We're learning from New York, Seattle, Denver and some other cities working with bonus initiatives to encourage teachers to stay with their preschool programs. We have to work really closely with our partners on this, looking at their wage structure. This is a big issue.
Q: What’s the breakdown of how the funding will be spent?
Lightcap: Eighty percent on quality and tuition assistance, the rest on marketing and education. We've learned a lot from our demonstration project in northwest Dayton and Kettering – one thing is that we need a really robust effort on helping people learn where to find high-quality pre-K and how to get to it.
Q: Talk about that project.
Lightcap: A couple years back, we began a small pilot in the Kettering school district. A citizens committee reviewed it and recommended broadening the pilot and taking it county-wide. So we continued in Kettering and added a portion of the city of Dayton – the city put in funding, we added private funding and so continued in those two areas this year.
Q: What’s the key to marketing this idea?
Charmaine Webster: We find that the No. 1 message is just how important preschool is – meeting with parents to spread the message. It will take a lot of grassroots, social media and paid media to get the message out about options and how many families are eligible for Title 20 funding, the childcare subsidy. We want parents to see that if they don't send their children to high-quality preschool how different their experience in kindergarten will be. I talked with a parent who shared that in preschool, her son had shown some behavioral problems that by the time he got to kindergarten, she saw a real difference – and she was glad he'd had that preschool year to work through.
Q: What percentage of preschools are now considered high quality?
Webster: Currently in Dayton, about two-thirds of families are sending their kids to preschools of varying quality – run by the school district, community programs, and family daycare.
Lightcap: Only about 40 percent are what we consider high quality.
Q: What are the hurdles to getting more programs to high-quality status?
Lightcap: It'll take a lot of hard work. We will have to find programs willing to do it, allowing outside assessors to come in and look at their programs, and meet benchmarks on improvement to one-star, two-star or three-star programs. If they don't want to do it, we'll invest in others.
Q: What’s their motivation?
Lightcap: Well, the state is rewarding programs with a high-quality rating that are serving low-income kids increased reimbursement for every star they go up. By 2020 if they're not starred programs, they won't be able to receive public funding – which for some, would be the end of their funds. So they're motivated at that level.
Q: How does it work at the family level?
Lightcap: We look at your household size, income and the star rating of the program your child is going to attend, and we offer monthly tuition assistance based on that. It's tiered, so higher income would receive a lesser amount. And we take into account state and federal assistance first, so our local funding would come in behind that to be more helpful for families who don't already qualify for those programs. You have to be at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level, which would be roughly $29,000 for a family of four.
Q: What will the governance be?
Lightcap: The 501(c)(3) would have a board of seven appointed by the city and county – three each, with the seventh appointed the first four years by Dayton, the next four by the county. There will also be an advisory board of business, education, community and non-profit leaders.
Langley: The idea was to design what this would look like if we take the effort countywide. The whole hope is to help our high-poverty families, and Dayton isn't the only place that has them. We designed this to expand and not have to come up with a whole new set of governance procedures.
Q: What are your thoughts on some of the research that early childhood education drifts away over the long term?
Whaley: Well, this is the first big step, but nobody here is saying, "Oh, we figure out preschool and we're done." This comes from the Learn to Earn model of starting there and moving to third-grade reading, high school education, college completion and beyond.
Lightcap: High-quality preschool isn't a silver bullet. For children to succeed, you need to have a safe home, healthy food, nutrition, medical care – there's no single solution. But if children don't do well in kindergarten, they're behind and that's not good. But this will take time. That's why the issue is an eight-year commitment.
Webster: But there's another point – if the community rallies around its youngest learners, then as they move through the K-12 system this challenges everyone to stay involved and causes us to be truly reflective of what we do for our children. Because we've made this investment in them, and we don't want it go to waste. This is a chance to plant that passion and desire in our parents while the children are young, as they go through the entire system.
Q: Are you optimistic about the broader goal of raising our local education level and workforce?
Lasley: I'm tremendously optimistic. For our community to be healthy, we really do need the human capital to be able to create the next-generation jobs – we're educating young people for working for 2040, 2060 and they'll need very different skills. We're setting the stage for them to compete in the global economy. Dayton is on the front edge of something very significant.
Whaley: I was at a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting where there was a long discussion about self-driving cars – and how they will affect the planning of communities in the future. Some cities are already working on this. Some of us were asking what this will mean to our workforce – Teamsters, Uber drivers, all these workers who will be affected. And the kids we're talking about today are 4 – I can't think of what the world will be like when they're 24 and entering the workforce. We have to invest today in way that looks at the next economy, the changes they'll experience and give them the best, fresh start. It's so important to get this right on the front end, since we have no idea what the world will be like in 20 years.
Lightcap: If we do this right, it sets the stage for the whole continuum of our childrens' journey through college.
Webster: We're not just investing in our children, but in our communities and families, and collectively we can start something together to be sure they are at their best.
Roundtable participants
Nan Whaley, mayor of Dayton
Thomas Lasley, CEO of Learn to Earn Dayton
Robyn Lightcap, executive director, Learn to Earn Dayton
Charmaine Webster, program manager, Preschool Promise
From Cox Media Group Ohio: Jim Bebbington, Jeremy Kelley, Cornelius Frolik, Ron Rollins
More about Issue 9
Issue 9 on the Nov. 8 general election ballot is a 0.25-percent earned income tax for the City of Dayton. With voter approval, Issue 9 will produce an additional $10-$11 million annually over the next eight years. Revenue generated will be dedicated to:
• Street maintenance in Dayton neighborhoods.
• Public safety services including community-responsive policing.
• Expanded park and vacant property maintenance.
• Affordable, high-quality preschool for all Dayton 4-year-olds.
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