Tomorrow, Memphians have a chance to go to the polls and vote for a small, small sales tax (half a percent, or $0.005 on every dollar) increase to support public education. The average family would barely see any dent in their budget, but the impact would be enormous. This money would pay for 4,500 children to receive pre-K education in Memphis. In addition, a chunk of the money raised would go towards lowering the property tax rate of Memphians.
The mayor and the city council have put together a committee of community members that would independently handle this money, preventing it from being siphoned off for other public programs. In other words, its a small tax spread over the populace, with a huge impact and an accountability measure built in.
You shouldn’t just vote for pre-K because of these reasons. You should vote for it because of the tremendous impacts it can have on the lives of our children. Here are the facts for what this will do for our city in the long run:
- For every $1 spent on pre-K, the community receives a return of $5.12 on its investment. This comes in the form of increased tax revenue, worker productivity, and many other areas
- Less than 1/3rd of our community’s four year olds are currently enrolled in pre-K education
- A study by Vanderbilt found that third graders that attended pre-K earned higher scores on their TCAP exams
- Long term impacts (again from the Vanderbilt study) include gains on cognitive tests, improvements in social development, reduced incarceration and teen pregnancies
With this information in hand, I have a hard time seeing how anyone could vote against increasing funding for pre-K. As a teacher, I want to teach kids that have gone through pre-K, that were set up for success coming into elementary school, and as a result built on that success so that by the time they get to me in high school they are confident, persevering young adults ready to tackle the next challenge!
Polls open from 7-7, please go and vote in support of this important referendum! You can find your polling location here. I’m voting for pre-K and so should you!
By Jon Alfuth
Follow Bluff City Education on Twitter @bluffcityed and look for the hashtag #iteachiam and #TNedu to find more of our stories. Please also like our page on facebook.
It’s actually even more children that it would help- 5,100, and some studies have shown as much as a 7 dollar return for every 1 dollar spent. Even more reason to get out and vote yes!
I pulled my numbers from the original statement put out by the city council, bug its good to know that’s the conservative estimate and that the benefits might be even greater!
Who is in charge of choosing this Pre-K curriculum? Will it be developmentally appropriate, or will it be (like much of education today) heavily test-centric?
Good questions all, but ones that are irrelevant if the funding isn’t there for the classrooms in the first place. We will need people like you engaging to make sure we have a robust pre-k curriculum