Help offered to pay for early learning

With state funding no longer available to subsidize the cost of child care, the community foundation is stepping in to fill the gap.

The Portland Foundation announced this week that it is launching a scholarship pilot program to help Jay County residents cover the cost of child care at Westminster Preschool Portland at Jay County Early Learning Center.

“Access to quality early education can have a lifelong impact on a child’s success,” said Doug Inman, executive director of The Portland Foundation. “This pilot program allows us to support families during a critical stage of development while evaluating how we can expand this model in the future.”

The program will offer 50 scholarships to cover part or all of the cost of enrollment at Westminster Preschool Portland. Scholarships will be based on need as determined by a sliding scale utilizing the Federal Poverty Level.

They are available to any child from infancy through age 5 and will continue as long as funding is available. More information and applications are available at portlandfoundation.org. Scholarships will be issued beginning Feb. 1.

The effort is in response to the state freezing the Child Care and Development Fund voucher program in December 2024. The vouchers helped families pay for child care costs for children from infancy through age 12.

The freeze came just weeks after Westminster Preschool Portland opened its doors.

In the year since, the facility in the former Judge Haynes Elementary School in Portland has topped out at 34 children. It has a capacity of 160.

“So the fact that it’s not extremely affordable for Jay County families to begin with, and then the people that really need the help, the state took it away,” said Inman. “So this is all in response to that. The Portland Foundation really just wants to help children and families afford early childhood education.”

The Portland Foundation started discussing early childhood education in 2017, when it partnered with Indiana Communities Institute at Ball State University for its Jay County 20/20 Vision initiative. Discussions through that process and strategic planning through a Community Leadership Grant from Lilly Endowment's Giving Indiana Funds for Tomorrow (GIFT VII) in 2021 and 2022 continued to come back to child care.

In 2022, the foundation purchased the former elementary school, 827 W. High St., Portland, that had closed to students four years earlier. A $4.3 million renovation project — about $1.3 million came from the foundation with grant funding from multiple sources — included a new roof, plumbing with restrooms installed in all of the toddler and preschool classrooms, paint, LED lighting and new playground equipment.

Westminster Preschools, based in Marion, entered into an agreement with The Portland Foundation to run the facility in 2023, and it opened in late 2024.

The facility at the Jay County Early Learning Center operates as a Level 4 — the highest — on the Family and Social Services Administration's Paths to Quality rating system. It carries that rating by providing for the health and safety of children, learning environments and planned curricula.

But, Inman acknowledged, keeping that level of services comes with a cost. Fees are $190 a week for a baby, $170 for a toddler age 1 to two-and-a-half, and so on.

“Partnering with The Portland Foundation enables us to welcome more children into a nurturing, high-quality learning environment,” said Dani Svantner, executive director of Westminster Preschools. “We are grateful for their investment in our students and the community.”

He pointed out that the foundation has been giving scholarships to college students since 1954, totaling more than $3 million over its history. He and the organization’s board see the pilot program as an extension of that mission.

“So what we're really doing with this is flipping the script and giving scholarships to kids that are 1, 2 and 3 years old, etc., to begin their educational careers in early learning,” Inman said. “Because there have been a multitude of studies done over the years that show that children that receive high-quality education, early education, are better in school, do a better job in their educational careers, K-12, they're better citizens of a community, they're just more productive adults.”

The pilot program is being paid for via the foundation’s unrestricted funds. If it is successful, it will likely be expanded to encourage more parents to take advantage of Westminster Preschool Portland’s services.

Still, Inman said, the scholarships are not a long-term solution. And the state voucher program is frozen until at least 2027.

For that reason, he said, the foundation is planning to approach businesses and industries for funding to help set up an endowment to support early learning. He noted that it is a workforce issue, as some parents choose to stay home instead of working because of the cost of child care.