Gov. Rick Perry has vetoed a bipartisan bill aimed at improving the quality of pre-kindergarten classes in Texas, bill author Rep. Diane Patrick, R-Arlington, said Friday afternoon.
It’s a bad day for public education and for Texas’ youngest and neediest children,” Patrick said.
House Bill 130 would have put in place new quality standards for pre-kindergarten classes, including teacher training and class size limits. The classes serve children who are homeless or in foster care, have a parent in the military, have limited English-speaking skills or whose families are low-income.
The original bill would have expanded pre-kindergarten classes from half-day to full-day for the children who now qualify for the program. But the initial $623 million price tag proved too much for the Legislature to swallow in a tight budget.
The final bill that cleared the Legislature, while keeping the quality standards, provided $25 million in grant money for districts that already have full-day pre-kindergarten but were slated to lose state funding.
UPDATE: Perry wrote in his veto statement that the money would be better used to expand the number of children served in the existing program.
“Under the funding formula for the existing grant program, $25 million would serve more than 27,000 students over the next biennium, which is 21,000 students more than the estimated 6,800 students that would have been served under the bill’s proposed program - or a 305 percent increase,” Perry wrote.
But Patrick noted that the $25 million does not provide the districts the full amount needed to offer full-day classes, so the districts will still bear significant costs.
Even with the veto, those districts will get the money but the quality standards will not take effect.
One-hundred House members had signed on to the bill, which had the strong backing of House Appropriations Chairman Jim Pitts.
“More Republicans supported the bill than not,” Patrick said. “Clearly, many Republicans as well as Democrats understand that pre-k education is an investment for which there is a great return.”
Advocates on both sides of the issue minced no words in responding to the veto.
“Gov. Perry was correct to veto HB 130, which created an additional and unnecessary government full-day pre-k program,” said Brooke Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “This legislation wrongly focused on inputs rather than results, and did not include the private sector as a full partner in providing early childhood education.”
But Jason Sabo of the United Ways of Texas said the veto was a “a willful neglect of the future.”