April 15, 2009

Minor Savings for More at Four Merger Predicted in First Two Years

Posted at 3:53 PM by Stephen Jackson

Savings of little more than $3 million over two years are predicted thanks to House Bill 539 that proposes a July 1, 2009 merger of More at Four and Smart Start by moving More at Four from DPI to the Department of Health and Human Services under the adminstrative eye of the North Carolina Partnership for Children.

The initial transfer of responsibility for the high quality pre-kindergarten program aimed at at-risk children would be followed by a two year study and phase-in period culminating in a report to several legislative committees in February 2011 that would essentially decide whether the merger was a good idea in the first place and how More at Four should be further integrated with Smart Start.

The obvious question is: If the savings are so low in the first two years (mostly achieved through layoffs of DPI staff) wouldn’t it be better to plan the integration more fully before leaping in and potentially discovering that the quick merger plan perhaps wasn’t such a good idea after all?

Further questions cloud the proposal, principally those around whether the merger signals the future possibility that the program itself could be altered in fundamental ways (as it would clearly under the Senate budget).

First: Will at-risk students continue to be served by More at Four or will eligibility requirements be altered so that the neediest children get denied access to More at Four? Under the bill, the current More at Four child eligibility requirements are only guaranteed through 2010-11.

Second: How will a merger affect the quality of instruction? What happens if the merger after two years does nothing to lower adminstrative costs? The pressure will be on to lower costs in some fashion.

H 539 is better than the Senate budget proposal that plainly alters the very nature of More at Four by converting it to a child-care subsidy program, albeit a high quality one. But still, you have to ask: Why would anyone implement a merger and check afterwards to see how it should be done and whether it was saving any money? This is not so much bootstrapping as flying blind, and we owe our neediest children much more than that.

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