KEENE — Little Peaks Preschool and Early Childhood Center reached their fall fundraising goal of $50,000 to help support the center’s Universal Pre-K program. This is their first fundraiser of this type, although they anticipate needing to continue raising money to make up for insufficient state funding.

Little Peaks has been a UPK provider for Keene Central School District since 2007. They reopened in their new building with year-round child care in the summer of 2023 and maintained their UPK program. As the designated provider for the district, they can get some funding from the state and some additional funding from the district. However, Dillon Prime, the center’s director, said this funding is still not enough to actually sustain their program.

UPK is a statewide program that provides preschool to 4-year-olds at no cost to families. It is not mandatory for districts to provide, although most in the area do. UPK slots are not guaranteed, however. The state requires facilities to hold a lottery when demand for UPK exceeds what they are funded for.

Prime said part of the reasons Little Peaks struggles to receive adequate state funding is because it’s very difficult to get the state to change the evaluation of what a program offers. Since Little Peaks is currently funded as if they were still a part-time UPK provider, they only get a small sum of money each year for about four children.

There is also an assumption at the state level that UPK programs will be mostly based out of district schools, Prime said. If UPK programs are run out of schools, then UPK teachers get breaks as students take classes with, say, the music or art teachers. Schools also have resources built in, like a cafeteria, that facilities like Little Peaks don’t have.

“For a standalone center, you’ve got to fill in all those pieces around the outside,” Prime said. “You need to figure out how to have enough staff to cover that teacher’s day, you need to figure out how to fill the full hours of the program, you need to figure out how you’re going to provide meals.”

Funding for UPK is technically only available to children who live in Keene or Keene Valley. However, Little Peaks receives students from outside the district and all of their 4-year-olds are combined in a classroom. As a matter of equity, it provides the same UPK programming to all of the kids in that age group, but doesn’t receive funding for all of them.

Little Peaks offers a few other streams of tuition assistance. There is some available through the statewide state Childcare Assistance Program and the Workforce Development Institute. They have a Little Peaks Tuition Assistance Fund that is available to students regardless of where they live, as well as a Keene Working Families Fund that was established with a $75,000 donation from a generous donor in the fall of 2024. This is for families living in Keene proper.

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Benefits of universal pre-k

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Providing a UPK program is not just a matter of having more child care slots. This program comes with expectations for a more robust and structured curriculum that is designed to prepare kids for kindergarten. Prime explained that this includes teaching things like rhyming, word play and counting. It is also important to prepare students for school by teaching an “intrinsic interest in doing and completing things well,” he said.

In short, supervision is not the same thing as learning.

UPK essentially provides an extra year of school for kids — in a time where a year’s worth of child care is like having an extra mortgage — and also allows both parents to work if they wish.

“It’s both a support and a larger economic boon to the area,” Prime said, adding it helps close the opportunity gap for women who want to go back to work.

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Building a sustainable program

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This most recent fundraiser was created in partnership with the High Peaks Education Foundation, with a one-to-one matching program. Little Peaks raised $25,000 dollars and the foundation matched that.

“We were able to create this seed fund of $50,000 to begin to offset the gap that we will never be able to cover through Keene Central and state funding,” Little Peaks Executive Director Janelle Schwartz said.

Schwartz and Prime hope this fund will be the beginning of making their program more sustainable. They are currently approved for 14 UPK students, including 4-year-olds who aren’t eligible for free UPK because they don’t live in the district. As a nonprofit, they usually have two major fundraisers each year, although future fundraisers might not be UPK-focused.

“The goal is tuition assistance — helping the families as much as we possibly can with whatever we possibly can,” Schwartz said. “We didn’t launch this as a one-off, we launched this as something that we could continue to grow and leverage against grants and other donations.”

Schwartz added they are grateful for the ongoing support, collaboration and open discussion with Keene CSD.