While the state does little and tuition-based preschools continue to be unaffordable for the majority of working families, there is a specific type of frustration that gradually accumulates in rural school districts—the kind that comes from witnessing children arrive at kindergarten already behind, year after year. That annoyance was eventually turned into a program in Grants Pass, Oregon. One that is free.
In 2023, the Grants Pass School District began its early learning program, providing free preschool classes, family playgroups, and parent workshops from a single location at Highland Elementary School. It was never ostentatious. Press conferences and ribbon-cutting events with politicians eager to claim credit were absent. All there was was an increasing pile of enrollment forms and an ever-lengthening waitlist.
The Early Childhood Coordinator for the district, Annie Blanchard, has been observing this firsthand. She will state unequivocally that the pandemic revealed something the community had been silently ignoring for years. “There was just a huge skill gap for children before they started school,” she stated. When children eventually entered kindergarten, it was evident that the shutdown had caused families to withdraw from whatever unofficial support networks they had put together, such as playgroups, library programs, and church nurseries. Sitting with that reality, it’s difficult to ignore the extent to which early learning infrastructure was never truly present in the first place.
The economic disparity that Grants Pass exposes is what makes the situation there so acute. Families who are eligible for Head Start, a federally funded program for children from low-income families, have options. The cost of private preschool tuition, which is well over $1,000 per month in many Oregon communities, is within the reach of wealthy families. However, a sizable portion of the population falls between those two groups: families who make just enough money to qualify for aid but not enough to write the check. These are the families on Blanchard’s waitlist, and those are the families she had in mind.
Since the program’s inception, playgroup participation has increased by 60%. The community’s requests are simply too much for Highland Elementary’s current space to accommodate. Therefore, the district is finding a way without waiting for funding or permission, just as it has done throughout. With the opening of a second location at Parkside Elementary in the fall of 2027, the total number of preschool spots will reach 72. Whether that figure will even start to reduce demand is still up in the air.
Donations and grants power the entire operation. There is no state line item. no specific source of public funding. The fact that the district is organizing a golf fundraiser in June to construct a playground at the Parkside location somehow sums up everything: a community literally raising money for swings because the system that ought to supply them hasn’t.
Observing initiatives like this emerge in small districts gives the impression that America’s most significant early education work is taking place covertly in locations that aren’t discussed in policy discussions. Legislators are not studying Grants Pass as a model. It’s simply a group of people who, with little funding and genuine conviction, decided to take action after seeing a gap. It remains to be seen if the funding will ever meet the demands.
