Reply to Why Does Van Ness Elementary School Not Have a Boundary

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[quote=Anonymous]There are plenty of reasons to offer free preschool to non-poor kids, and having them mix with poor kids (to the benefit of both) is only one.  Even the richer kids would be learning stuff that can help them academically later on.  Also, if the District can get a parent to go back to work when her kid is 3 instead of 5, they get some extra income tax in those years.  It doesn't totally make up for the cost of school, but it certainly offsets it--and if it leads to the parent getting onto a higher salary track over the course of a career it could make a real difference.

The biggest factor is probably that free PreK keeps high-earning families in DC.  A family that earns $200k a year and lives in a $600k house pays  over $10k in income taxes and probably about $4k in property taxes.  That more than covers one kid's public schooling; even if they have more than one kid it's kind of a loss leader--rather than moving to the suburbs, these families will spend more money in the District, keep property values high, and make the schools and the neighborhoods look good to other families compared to if they moved to the suburbs.  So those families are valuable to DC.

Of course, this supposes DC thought about all this.  It's possible they just do it because they want to do it, or because it's too hard to implement a sliding scale.  [/quote]

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