📝 Report Card 05/14/26

When I was a little kid, I was lucky enough to be sent to Montessori school, a preschool focused on hands-on learning and building independence. My main memory of the experience was learning how to polish silver, which was great for developing my fine motor skills, but surprisingly, has not come up often in my adult life.

The world of early education has changed a lot in the two decades since I was in preschool. In Washington, several innovative programs, intended to target families that can’t afford to send their children to private preschool, have grown and served more and more families.

But the last few months have been challenging for the world of early education. The state made cuts to the school district-operated Transition to Kindergarten program, resulting in dozens of slots disappearing in our region. Staff are working to find ways to still provide some of that care. Working Connections, a subsidy program for child care in the state, saw $143 million in cuts.

And a change to the funding allocation model for community colleges left a parenting education program unfunded, leaving colleges to find new funding sources, and connected co-op preschools to reorganize how they function altogether.

In the private/nonprofit child care space, my colleague Julia Tellman recently took a deep dive into child care for her series, Priced Out, which looks at the high cost of living in the region. A Whatcom County family spends an average of $16,320 on child care per year — making these free, accessible options for early learning all the more important. And getting a child care slot is hard to come by, too.

It’s not all bad news. Last year, the Governor announced that the Ballmer Group had committed up to $1 billion to the ECEAP program (learn more in the glossary below), funding up to 10,000 new slots. About 2,000 slots should be added this year. Some of those will likely wind up in our region.

Also, despite a slow start, Whatcom County’s Healthy Children’s Fund is on track to create 310 child care slots and is working on projects that will create another 121, according to Julia's reporting.

Plus, outdoor education is emerging as a viable, licensed alternative that has lower operational costs than a typical program. These types of programs started becoming licensed in 2019, so families can use child care subsidies to pay for them, too.

I visited Keystone Preschool recently, run by the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association. Education Program Manager Nathan Zabel said these programs are pretty resilient due to their lack of physical structures: “It's more economical when you don't have a building to maintain but can instead rely on the natural environment to operate a program,” he told me. They’re quite cool, too, I thought. Read about my visit to Keystone here.

Sometimes, programs serve overlapping populations. Here’s a quick guide:

Our readers feel pretty mixed on the introduction of AI tools in education, based on last month’s poll. About 40% said all AI use should be limited in schools; 53% said it depends on the tool and how it’s used; and about 7% said they felt pretty positive about the idea.

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about school start times. I dove into this issue as the Ferndale School Board had a multi-meeting discussion about whether to flip its current schedule and send elementary kids to school early, and high schoolers later. Research shows later start times are better for adolescents, but the logistical challenge of reorganizing bus routes, child care, athletics and more to fit that kind of schedule proved to be too big an ask for some Ferndale board members.

NBC News: "The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury." Pushback is growing against this program that most local districts use to track students' academic growth.

The Walrus: "The New York Times Got Caught Using AI Hallucinations in Its Reporting." The Times' Canada bureau chief, likely the highest-paid reporter in the country, published a fake, AI-generated quote from Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre. It took more than two weeks for the Times to notice and issue a correction.

Cannonball: “We Defend Our ‘Greatest Songwriters’ List.” I love it when news outlets try to tackle “greatest” lists, mostly because of the discourse that ensues. I’ve had fun digging into the New York Times’ attempt to pick the 30 greatest living American songwriters, and enjoyed this episode of them explaining, mostly, why Billy Joel didn’t make the cut.