Thousands more New York families will have access to free prekindergarten this school year, as the state begins a multi-year push to make the program universal.<\/p>\n
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Wednesday that new seats are being added in more than 400 public school districts \u2014 more than half of all public school districts statewide \u2014 with universal access for 4-year-olds planned by fall 2028.<\/p>\n
Hochul announced the expansion as the new school year gets underway. The governor marked the rollout at a pre-K center on Long Island.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll never stop fighting to lower costs for families \u2014 and our historic investment has already delivered thousands more free Pre-K seats statewide, with tens of thousands more in the coming years,\u201d Hochul said in a statement. \u201cAs New York\u2019s first mom Governor, putting us on the path to statewide universal Pre-K was personal for me \u2014 and I\u2019m ensuring that we will deliver on that promise.\u201d<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s state budget includes a $563 million annual funding increase for universal pre-K during the 2026-27 school year.<\/p>\n
The Hochul administration claimed annual funding available for the program has risen more than 70% since 2021.<\/p>\n
The expansion reaches every region, including 58 districts in Western New York, 53 in the Mid-Hudson region, 45 in the Capital Region and 42 in the Finger Lakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands more New York families will have access to free prekindergarten this school year, as the state begins…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[67,9,24,11,10,49,51,50,12,112,87,380,200],"class_list":["post-336163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-education","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-news","tag-ny-state-of-politics","tag-politics","tag-spectrum-news-staff","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}