This story was originally published by The Daily Yonder.

Chris Nelson teaches preschool in rural Vermont, just a few miles from the Canadian border, but not in the school or child care center most people think of when they imagine state or locally funded pre-K. Instead, her 3- and 4-year-old students are integrated into her five-star-rated home-based child care program, where she also cares for younger children and a few kids who come after school until their working parents pick them up.

Many of those parents would have to drive more than an hour to reach a center- or school-based pre-K program where the state covers tuition for just 10 hours a week. In contrast, Nelson’s program is open 12 hours a day to cover parents’ commutes, the nontraditional hours of shift workers and those who do seasonal work.

Nelson would like to continue teaching pre-K, and parents of those children would like to receive the state’s $3,800 free tuition for enrolling in Nelson’s program. However, new recommendations from Vermont’s School Board Insurance Trust (VSBIT), which insures schools and preschool programs, effectively exclude home-based providers from participation, because the $2 million insurance policy they recommend (based on school district needs) isn’t even available to home-based child care providers, sometimes also called family child care providers or FCCs. Nelson brought the problem to the attention of state child care regulators. In a memo released in mid-June to school district superintendents, Vermont Agencies of Education and Human Services indicate that local departments of education can waive the insurance requirement for home-based pre-K programs that are unable or cannot afford to secure the policy recommended by VSBIT. Because this policy change has come so late, just two months before the 2024 school year begins, when most districts have already made decisions about partnerships with private pre-K providers, it remains to be seen how many home-based child care providers will be able to offer pre-K this year.

Vermont, like many states, is committed to a mixed-delivery model for pre-K education, allowing the state’s pre-K tuition subsidy to be applied for programs in a variety of existing settings, including those based in homes. Nevertheless, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) State of Preschool 2023 Yearbook, in 2022-2023, more than 60 percent of pre-K children served were in public school settings, not private programs or home-based child care options. Together, all of those programs served just 44 percent of eligible 4-year-olds and 17 percent of 3-year-olds. More than half of all 3- and 4-year-old children still do not attend preschool. For many rural families especially, the barriers of paying for and getting their children to a pre-K program are just too great.

Creating “universal” access to high-quality pre-K will require a massive, long-term public investment (as much as $33 billion, according to NIEER). In the near term, states can increase access by leveraging the existing infrastructure for providing pre-K in the home-based programs that already serve many rural families. Policy experts like The Erikson Institute and NIEER recommend “meaningfully” including and supporting home-based child care providers in the expansion and implementation of publicly funded pre-K as a promising first step to increasing access, especially in states where more than 50 percent of the population lives in a child care desert. A new initiative led by Home Grown, a national funder collaborative focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, in partnership with NIEER, would support state, city, county and tribal government leaders to include home-based child care in their pre-K programs.

States’ commitment to a mixed-delivery model often falters in part because many, like Vermont, have a governance structure that reinforces a tendency to see pre-K as just an additional grade before kindergarten, with regulations and funding that follow the template of elementary education. These include layers of requirements for teacher licensure, classroom environments and administrative oversight. Meanwhile, home-based child care is overseen by the department of social services, with different parameters for licensure and oversight. Former state Rep. Ashton Clemmons, who co-chaired the early childhood caucus in North Carolina’s General Assembly, notes that this “disalignment” works to segregate infant-toddler caregivers from those who teach pre-K.

“If you give parents a voucher and let them go where they want to, many parents would choose FCCs for pre-K as well as care for their infants and toddlers,” says Rachel Bymun, a licensed home-based child care provider in Bay Point, California, a low-income, primarily immigrant community an hour from San Francisco. She notes that although California also subscribes to a mixed-delivery model, her county does not have the Family Child Care Home Education Network that would enable home-based child care providers like her to participate in California’s subsidized pre-K program. As a result, families in her county who wish to access publicly funded pre-K have to leave her program and enroll in another setting.

The families who prefer a home-based child care environment often are the most underserved and hard to reach, including families of color, those in rural communities, those who speak languages other than English, and those who work nontraditional hours, according to Alexandra Patterson, director of policy and strategy at Home Grown, a national collaborative of funders supporting home-based child care: “Excluding these providers from the formal pre-K system further marginalizes the families and providers who most need those resources.”

Another significant barrier to access is that working parents need more than two to six hours of care per day for 180 days a year, which is the typical pre-K school year. Many eligible working parents struggle to get multiple children of different ages to different schools or can’t find a preschool with an open slot that is also within commuting distance from their work and home. Home-based pre-K, on the other hand, is typically integrated into a comprehensive child care program serving multiple children of mixed ages that is open all day and year-round. This family-like setting, according to this report from The Erikson Institute, provides continuity and stability for children, culturally and linguistically responsive care, individualized education, and fosters the community connections and relationships that families rely on for support from each other and their child’s teacher.

Nelson’s nature-based, play-based approach to learning in a small, mixed-age group is a strength of home-based pre-K that many parents prefer to hectic classrooms full of 20 or 30 4-year-olds.

“Schools mandate 275 days a year for learning,” she says, “but I believe every single minute is a teachable moment. On a typical day, we might visit the pond to collect tadpoles and bring them back so that children can learn about life cycles. The two-year-olds might want to feel the little jelly eggs, and the older ones will see that the eggs grow legs and tails and grow into frogs.”

This approach is also endorsed by the National Academies New Vision for High Quality Preschool Curriculum. The “Magic 8” preschool classroom practices, according to child development researchers, include precisely the practices FCCs implement daily in their homes: lots of listening to children, holistic sequential activities, cooperative interactions between kids, and minimal time spent in transition from one space to another or between lessons. These videos from Home Grown feature home-based child care providers demonstrating these practices as they teach and care for mixed-age groups of children.

How could publicly funded pre-K programs enroll more children and accommodate the needs of more families? NIEER’s recent report and recommendations from the Erikson Institute on pay equity and support for providers detail strategies for setting pre-K reimbursement rates to reflect the true cost of providing high-quality pre-K services in a home-based child care setting. These include supporting home-based providers with educational, coaching and evaluation programs specific to preschool standards, setting environmental recommendations and the ratio of infants to toddlers allowed under a caregiver’s license appropriately for home-based settings. Changes like these would allow Nelson and other home-based child care providers to sustain their programs and open their doors to 3- and 4-year-olds who are waiting in the wings for school to start. This solution also builds on and strengthens the existing capacity of FCC educators, buttressing states’ workforces and economies in both the short and long terms.

What’s more, this solution doesn’t require building new preschool wings onto aging school buildings or training up a new cadre of preschool teachers. What it does require, says Patterson, is an “innovative and inclusive view of family child care homes as centers of learning, and of qualified caregivers who operate them as early childhood educators,” that is, pre-K teachers deserving of all the same support and salary afforded to school- or center-based pre-K programs.