Forum Focuses on Early Childhood Education

“By the time they are three years old, most children have already developed 85 percent of their core brain capacity,” Dr. Gera Jacobs told attendees at the Leadership Forum on Early Childhood Education today. Jacobs, a researcher at the University of South Dakota, said that children living in poverty are much more likely to enter kindergarten developmentally far behind their peers who come from middle class families. Many never catch up, and as a adults they are more likely to end up in prison or dependent on one form of social service or another.

The forum, which was organized by the South Dakota and Rapid City Chambers of Commerce along with South Dakota Voices for Children highlighted the economic and social benefits of investing in early childhood education. Keynote speaker, Art Rolnick, from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, told the audience that high-quality early childhood education programs, targeted for children in poverty, can produce a 16 percent inflation-adjusted return on investment. In other words, for every $1 spent in the pre-K classroom, taxpayers save $1.16 on prisons, unemployment, and other social service programs.

Taking a Market-Based Approach

Rolnick and Raven Industries CEO Ron Moquist emphasized a voluntary, market-based approach to pre-K education that empowers parents to choose a program that fits their family and their values. The programs they described in Minnesota and Sioux Falls provide incentives for non-profit and for-profit providers to offer a curriculum that prepares children to enter school at age five. “Our program rewards outcomes,” Rolnick said of the privately-funded Minnesota Early Learning Foundation. If children leave a program and pass the Minnesota Readiness Test, then the program is eligible to continue receive funding from the Foundation.

“Society pays in many ways when children fail,” says Ron Moquist, CEO of Raven Industries.

Several speakers emphasized that market-based, pre-K funding focused on children in poverty should not be a threat to private childcare providers. “Most of these children are not currently in a pre-K program,” said Moquist. Instead, “they are often footballed around between boyfriends, neighbors and friends.” Moquist underscored the need for pre-K education by reminding the audience that 80 percent of women with children under the age of six in South Dakota are employed.

State Senator Tom Dempster of Minnehaha County is working with private pre-K programs to draft a bill for the Legislature that will support a market-based approach to meeting the state’s early childhood educational needs. Several of the legislators who will debate this bill were in the audience today, along with members of the Rapid City Area Schools Board of Education.

A copy of the 2003 study of economic benefits of early childhood education prepared by Rob Grunewald and Arthur Rolnick at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve is available here. Read Barbara Soderlin’s story in the Rapid City Journal here.