Nashville’s Pre-K Expansion Has Made Room For Middle-Class Families

Nashville’s pre-K program is adding 276 more slots this year, thanks to a 4-year federal grant. And the recent growth has opened up space for middle-class families to attend for the first time. 

Metro’s pre-K director, Dana Eckman, says it’s been good for the city to have more affluent families attending. Previously, students had to qualify as low-income. Now, she says the early learning centers are split 50-50.

“You have children that are coming in with really high academic language that are modeling for other children,” she says. “We’ve seen that we’re reaching our outcomes at a faster rate because we have diversity.”

One of those newly-eligible students is the daughter of Darwin Mason. He says his wife is a stay-at-home mom. But the couple thought it was important to get their 4-year-old in school, so they enrolled her at the new Bordeaux Early Learning Center.

“To be able to have her experience students from all different backgrounds was huge because that’s the world that we live in,” he says. “She has diversity in ethnicity and race but also in socioeconomic status. I think what Metro is doing is the right decision for kids.”

Mason is an elementary school principal in the district. Though there have been some
discouraging studies about pre-k’s long-term effectiveness, Mason says he feels like the extra year is good for his incoming kindergarteners. 

Nashville is still far from universal pre-K, with a total of 2,752 students last year. In Antioch, for instance, there were a thousand more people who wanted to attend than the number of seats available. Southeast Davidson County is where most of the new pre-K classrooms will be this fall, including an entirely new pre-K site called Cambridge Early Learning Center.