"Let the wild rumpus start," said 5-year-old Jane Petit as she and a preschool mate played with cloth characters to act out scenes from Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book, "Where the Wild Things Are."
As Jane added her own flair to the story, across the Neptune Early Learning Center more than 200 other 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds were also learning, and playing, under the watchful eye of 47 trained and certified staff members.
Teacher Carol Krasowski of Brick, who has taught early-childhood education for 15 years including the last seven in Neptune praises the curriculum and environment at the center.
"It's amazing," Krasowski said. "It gives them the opportunity to really discover and learn through play. Play is the children's work. Everything has lots of math skills and literacy skills behind it."
It is an environment offered free of charge to roughly 40,000 students in Neptune and 30 other needy school districts in the state as part of the court-ordered Abbott program to improve public education for lower-income pupils.
But beginning in September, New Jersey's preschool program will expand: Eighty-seven more school districts will be required to offer universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-olds. All children in the state who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches also will be offered free full-day preschool; that income limit is about $37,000 for a family of four.
When fully implemented by 2013, New Jersey estimates 70,000 children will be eligible for free preschool, and it will raise the state Department of Education preschool spending from about $520 million to about $850 million.
Neptune resident Susan Harney said her two children have benefited from their time in the Early Learning Center, where she is now the Parent-Teacher Organization's president.
"It's not a day care, it's a school," said Harney, whose 4-year-old son, Jacob, is a student at the center now. Her 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, was at the center for preschool and is now in first grade.
"They have a schedule that they follow, and it's not just babysitting. After they go through the program, they have an advantage over the other kids who have not been through it."
What school districts may not have is money to build new classrooms. Many, if not most, are looking at using local day-care centers to run their preschool programs, as Asbury Park does for its Abbott preschool program.
In Red Bank, for instance, school officials have had to visit three day-care centers to figure out which could open two classes of 15 children each in September as a trial run. Red Bank already offers full-day preschool to 100 4-year-olds on school property. But there's little space for an expansion, said Laura C. Morana, the Red Bank superintendent of schools.
The expansion to 3-year-olds could increase Red Bank's preschool enrollment by another 122.
"I'm going to have to look at the capacity of the private day-care providers to see how we can meet the needs of our children," Morana said. The state has told her to expect to receive $11,506 for each child taught by the district, and $12,934 for each child placed in a day-care center, or about $1.4 million next year.
Theresa Hayes, director of Child Care Resources, Monmouth County's child-care resource and referral agency, said free preschool has benefited children in the Abbott districts and has provided the funding to ensure that classes are being taught by well-trained teachers.
Hayes said she is concerned that if many districts choose to build their own early learning centers to meet the preschool mandates, some day-care centers may go out of business. That could make it difficult for parents who need child care for several hours beyond the traditional school day, she said.
"We're hoping that districts will continue to use community-based child-care centers," Hayes said.
Even districts with early learning centers, such as Neptune, are required to provide at least one community-based alternative site, Early Learning Center Principal James Nulle said. In Neptune, that is Little Class 3, on Green Grove Road.
For the children who will be newly eligible for the preschool, they will have a teacher with a bachelor's degree and a teaching certification in each classroom, along with a certified teacher's aide.
And while only children from those districts will be taught in the day-care center classrooms paid for with state funds, the quality of education for all pupils in those centers stands to improve as a result, said Nancy Thompson, the president of the New Jersey Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies.
"When you have seven classrooms, and four of your classrooms have certified teachers, it's going to affect the way everything is run in the building," Thompson said.
Free preschool education already is offered through the court-mandated Abbott program to children in Neptune, Asbury Park, Keansburg, Long Branch and 27 other districts in the state.
Berkeley Superintendent Joseph H. Vicari said his district will have to offer preschool to about 500 children by 2013.
"It's going to be a hardship, because of the fact (of) where is the money going to come from?" Vicari said.
Vicari said he supports the idea of providing preschool for Berkeley children, but he worries that the state will not provide enough funding to pay for the preschool mandate.
"For the classrooms alone, you'd need another school just for the preschool," said Vicari, who is also an Ocean County freeholder. "We have to do it, and we're going to do it, but the fact that we need to provide it for all our students means we're needy, and we need help from the state."