My State Preschool story

In case you have not noticed we are a military family.  Two years ago when I first started looking into preschool for Princess I was blind-sided by information that I did not meet income guidelines.  I had two children and lived in military housing.

For those civilian readers military gets a housing allowance that is based off of the installation where you are living. San Diego is rather high, so is the cost of living. IF you live in housing you do not get that money. If you live out in town you get in along with your paycheck. Military folks call it BHA, in translation Basic Housing ALLOWANCE. Allowance, which is just what it is. It has gone up and it has gone down over the years.

I believe during that time my husbands base pay was around two thousand dollars a month. Granted we did not have to pay rent.

Looking back we made 2238 a month.  Lets just say my husband works a 40 hour work week with 4 weeks a month. That is $13.98 per hour. Not bad right?

Well Let me break this down for you…

At the VERY least he has duty every 6 days. He goes in at 645 say on Thursday (duty day) he does not get off until MAYBE 430 Friday to come home. While on that duty he has watch which is anywhere from 4 hours to 10 hours. Depending on his watch station.

So lets just say he works 7-4 daily that is 9 hours, we will say a 6-day work week (since he has duty every 6 days and is at the ship working a double) that is about $10 an hour. Which from what I believe would put us in the line for State Funded Preschool.

All of this is of course for MY family.  During that year my husband was never home, and I was doing my single mom thing.

Get a job you say? Yes get a job to pay for daycare for the other child and to pay for preschool. It really makes no sense. It is not financially possible.

So that following year I put Princess into a wonderful private preschool and we managed our money rather well and did okay.  Not everyone is able to do that.

This year Prince was up for preschool. He has an IEP and I was told that because he has an IEP that he would be able to go to preschool no matter what.

WRONG.

Once again we will be putting him in private school. We make to much money. Which I knew, my husband made rank since dealing with the situation with Princess.

The thing that upsets me about this situation is that IF I had lived IN housing I could have her in a state preschool if there was one there. If not, I was out of luck. Not if I live out in town though.

What about the families who have someone on deployment, who have someone in a war zone?

We can get WIC and we can get daycare though CDC but we cannot have our children start school at an earlier age to get them started on their education.

I am willing to say that 90% of military kids move at least once in their parent’s careers. I know plenty that move more.  This brings children behind in their education. (I am not saying that ALL military kids are behind in their education)  California has one of, if not the largest Naval Base in California, on the west coast even, why can’t they get funding for military children to start their education at a preschool level? After all hasn’t their been studies to prove that children that start preschool do better in school then those children who do not?

I guess you could say I am sore on the subject. My husband works his butt off for this country, misses so much of my children’s lives and the state is counting EVERY allowance that he gets.

These allowances are just that, an allowance. They can be taken at any time and reduced at any time.  We provide money to this state as well as the economy of the school district because we spend our paychecks here. It saddens me to think that those parents who can not afford a preschool have to wait until kindergarten so their babies can get the education and interaction that they deserve.

Maybe one-day things will change. For now we write our Congressmen and Congresswomen about this issue.