Robert P. Casey Jr.
Casey has become a leading advocate for early education
June 4, 2007
Source: The Scranton Times Tribune
By Borys Krawczeniuk
Two weeks ago, Sen. Hillary Clinton announced that as president she would push for federal money to support preschool education for 4-year-olds.
Last week, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr. moderated a forum in Scranton on his bill, the Prepare All Kids Act of 2007, to establish federal funding for preschools.
Spokesmen for the two Democratic senators say the timing of their events was a coincidence.
By the time either initiative becomes federal law, Mrs. Clinton could be president.
But Mr. Casey, who introduced his bill 10 days before Mrs. Clinton spoke up, has already started accomplishing his first goal.
He wants the 2008 presidential candidates talking about early childhood education, he said after the forum at the United Way of Lackawanna County.
“A presidential campaign is a tremendous opportunity to highlight this issue,” he said.
With campaign promises serving as a reminder, the freshman Democratic senator’s push for pre-kindergarten funding and increased funding for state Children’s Health Insurance Programs signals that young children are among of his major priorities.
“This is an issue that he really feels passionately about,” said Larry Smar, Mr. Casey’s director of communications.
Children’s issues got little attention during Mr. Casey’s campaign against Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum last year, although Mr. Casey’s plans were on his campaign Web site, and he hosted a conference focused on children.
“He was one of the few candidates who talked about early education at all in the campaign,” said Kelly Swanson, a spokeswoman for Pre K Counts in Pennsylvania, an initiative begun to advocate for preschools.
The attention to CHIP, as the children’s health insurance program is known, is in character for Mr. Casey, whose fondness for it has familial roots. His father, Robert P. Casey Sr., launched Pennsylvania’s version as governor in 1992.
In five months, expanding CHIP has surfaced on Mr. Casey’s agenda more than any other issue.
Financed by state and the federal government, CHIP covers — free — more than 4 million children nationwide, including about 150,000 in Pennsylvania who live in households with incomes twice the federal poverty level, about $41,000 for a family of four.
President Bush is proposing about $5 billion in CHIP funding in the year starting Oct. 1 and almost $5 billion more the year after that, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank.
Mr. Casey and Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts; Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.; and Max Baucus, D-Mont., want a five-year, $50 billion appropriation, or about $10 billion a year. That would cover the 6 million children who aren’t covered now, Mr. Smar said.
The four senators sponsored a successful budget amendment in March naming CHIP expansion as the Senate’s top health care priority.
The early childhood initiative is more Mr. Casey’s own.
In 2001, Mr. Casey hosted a conference at Harvard University that highlighted research demonstrating the effectiveness of educating students at 3 and 4 years old. A year later, Mr. Casey’s campaign for governor against Ed Rendell proposed state money for preschools.
His bill has no co-sponsors but is based on research that shows the benefits of a solid preschool education.
One study, known as the Perry Preschool Study, focused over 40 years on students who attended a Michigan preschool in the 1960s. The study showed they did better in school in future years, were more likely to graduate, far less likely to commit crimes and far more likely to raise children in stable households.
When Mr. Casey ran for governor, Pennsylvania was one of nine states that offered no state funding for preschool education, Ms. Swanson said.
Mr. Rendell won that election and began his own push for more early childhood education, including giving school districts the option of starting preschools. This year, Mr. Rendell is proposing a $75 million appropriation dedicated solely to preschools. It would aid about 11,000 3- and 4-year-olds, including 700 in Lackawanna County.
Mr. Casey’s bill proposes supplementing that with $5 billion in federal money spread among states that fund preschools and adding $1 billion more each year through 2012. That money would be in addition to the $6.8 billion in federal money proposed by Mr. Bush for Head Start, the existing and mostly successful federal early education program. But where Head Start focuses on children strictly at the poverty level and supplements their education with health, nutritional and other social services, Mr. Casey’s proposal would focus mostly on education and on children living at up to twice the poverty level, Mr. Smar said.
Neither Mr. Rendell’s proposal nor Mr. Casey’s is assured of passage. Mr. Casey freely admits his bill is unlikely to pass in time for the fiscal year 2008 federal budget that starts Oct. 1. He plans to spend the summer rounding up co-sponsors.
“We could be in for a long struggle on this,” Mr. Casey said last week. “It could take years because it’s a new appropriation and it’s making an investment that the government doesn’t want to make now.”
In an April interview, he explained his focus on CHIP and preschools.
“All this talk about growing the economy and being great entrepreneurs, competing in a world economy ... all of it gets back to kids,” he said. “Unless you give a child all the possible benefits that we can give them ... nutrition, health care, intensive, intensive early learning ... they might make progress on their own ... but to reach the full measure of their potential ... you’ve got to get them early.”
