In another example of voters doing something local that Congress should already have done, Seattle voters voted themselves a small property tax increase to offer free or subsidized preschool to children from low- and middle-income families, while increasing pay for preschool teachers and expanding teacher training requirements. The vote will
create a $58 million levy over four years, taxing the owner of a $400,000 home an additional $43 a year:
The money will go to select, high-quality preschools to provide slots to families based on income. It will ramp up over time, serving 280 children in 2015, and subsidizing up to 2,000 by 2018.
It will make preschool free for families earning up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $70,000 a year for a family of four.
Families earning between 300 percent and 760 percent of the poverty level will get subsidies. This four years is a pilot project with a slow ramp up and a limited size even in 2018, but hopefully after 2018 it will shed its pilot status and move forward. Officials estimate that true universal preschool would need to serve
about 9,000 children.
Voters were faced with a choice between competing preschool expansion measures. First, they had to vote yes or no to the general concept of funding preschool, then choose between this measure, Proposition 1B, and Proposition 1A, which would have raised the minimum wage for child care workers to $15 an hour, created an oversight board and a fund to raise quality standards at child care centers, and mandated that families not spend more than 10 percent of their income on child care. That measure did not have a funding mechanism attached. An endorsement of Prop. 1B from The Stranger argues that "they should never have been pitted against each other on your ballot in the first place." But they were, and most importantly voters chose to do something rather than nothing (voters being very different than Congress on that front).