I grew up poor in California. There were stretches when we were homeless, many days I was hungry, and mornings I went to school in shoes with broken straps.
What I remember most from those years is not the hunger or the shoes. It is the way I felt singled out for getting a subsidized lunch. The free lunch line told the other kids who I was before I ever opened my mouth — and it still stings today.
California’s childcare funding formulas incent providers to segregate classrooms by income — another version of the free lunch line. As California lawmakers finalize the state budget, they are rightly pushing back against Gov. Newsom’s proposed cuts to childcare funding. To truly address inequities, the state must also ensure that children have access to high-quality care that is integrated by income.
I was in the fourth grade when my family finally landed in Vista and began, slowly, to climb into the middle class. Eventually I built a life, and today I operate eight childcare centers in San Diego County plus soon-to-open centers in Ramona and Escondido.
But I never forgot what it was like to stand in the “poor kid” lunch line — or what that line had quietly taught me. It taught me that because my parents did not have what other parents had, I would be sorted. It told me, every day, where I belonged. Children absorb that lesson long before they have the words for it, and they are absorbing it in preschool classrooms right now.
A high-quality preschool classroom should look like this: children from families across the income spectrum, in the same room, taught by the same teachers, eating the same meals, playing on the same playground, held to the same standard of care. You should not be able to walk into a classroom and tell which child receives a subsidy and which child’s family pays full price. That is what high quality looks like.
I remember the day my first subsidy-supported child walked into a classroom at one of my earliest preschools. He was small. He went straight to the food trays of the other children and began taking food off them — not out of mischief, but in a quiet, deliberate way, as if he had to claim it before it disappeared. I learned later from his mother that this was the world he knew. Plenty was a threat, because plenty had never lasted.
He had access to that classroom of plenty because, in those years, families who could afford the true cost of high-quality care made the abundance possible for every child in the room. The fresh fruit on his tray was possible because another family could pay my preschool what care actually costs; the boy with a subsidy could eat it too. That was the design, and the design worked.
The design has eroded. The true cost of high-quality early learning has risen faster than family buying power — making adequate state funding essential. Fewer families can pay what that care actually costs; more depend on a subsidy that has never been calibrated to cover it.
The result is a system that pushes providers toward one of two outcomes — classrooms that serve only subsidized children, or classrooms that serve only families who can pay. Two doors. Two cohorts. A small child sorted by her parents’ tax bracket before she can speak in full sentences. Segregation by income, built into the architecture of the system that is supposed to give every child a fair start.
Income-segregated classrooms are bad for the children who lack resources. They are also bad for the children who have them. Both grow up in narrower worlds. Both lose the chance to know each other. By the time we sort our preschool-aged children by family income, the damage to both sides has already begun. Our youngest children should not have to stand in their own version of the lunch line.
Julie Lowen is the founder and CEO of Children’s Paradise Preschool & Infant Centers, serving families across North County San Diego.
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