The term “food desert” was created in the 1990s to describe areas where residents don’t have access to healthy, affordable food. With no adequate markets within a reasonable distance, people living in food deserts are more likely to live on fast food and what they can buy in local mini-marts, most of which is unhealthy and overpriced, rather than what you find at most supermarkets. The general health and wellbeing of people living in food deserts would be improved significantly if the residents had access to healthy food they can afford.

It’s time to coin a new term: daycare desert. It describes places where parents have little access to any kind of affordable daycare, let alone high quality early childhood education, for their children. Daycare deserts are deeper and wider in the U.S. than elsewhere in the industrialized world, and Arizona is one of the most parched states in the country. To improve the educational health and wellbeing of children and adults living in daycare deserts, we need to bring affordable, high quality early childhood education within easy access.

Proposition 204 gives us the opportunity to turn Tucson’s daycare deserts into oases of quality early childhood education for upwards to 8,000 three and four year olds at the cost to the community of a one-half percent increase in sales tax. So far as I know, Prop 204 is the country’s boldest effort to correct the daycare crisis in recent years, and if it passes — I’m being serious here, I don’t consider this an overstatement — it could be a national game changer, pointing the way for other communities to improve the lives of their young children.

Most people agree it’s a good idea to make early childhood education available to more children, but detractors say Prop 204 leaves too much room for things to go wrong, both in what is included and left out of the proposal. Me personally, I think Prop 204 is not just a good idea, it’s a great idea, and I agree with Weekly Editor Jim Nintzel when he wrote, “I think the accountability concerns are misguided at best.” The concerns are legitimate, but vastly overstated.

Further down, you’ll find links to a few pieces which do an excellent job of presenting the information you need to know about the Prop 204 and the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, vote for it, which means I don’t have to do it here. Instead, I’m going to give you a decision-making recommendation.

Pull the balance scale you use to weigh serious decisions down from the shelf where you store it. On one side of the scale, place the value of giving three and four year old children the kind of educational start in life which will give them the best chance of being successful in school and throughout their lives. On the other side, put the possibilities that things might go wrong if the people in charge of creating and implementing the program don’t do a good job. See which way the scales tip. That’s how you should vote.

I’ll tell you what I see on my balance scale. On one side, I see a little golden nugget of potential and unexplored possibilities for each of the thousands of three and four year olds who will get an early childhood education. On the other side, I see a handful of stones with words like “Worst case scenario,” “This could go wrong,” “That could go wrong,” written on them. My scales tip heavily in favor of the children whose lives will be enriched by Prop 204. But that’s just me. You have your own scale. Use it.

Here are three pieces you can read if you want help weighing your decision. The first is a Weekly cover story by Danyelle Khmara with lots of information and background. It leans a bit toward the pro side of the argument, but not much. The second is an opinion piece by Blake Morlock where he says he supports the idea of early childhood education but believes Prop 204 is fatally flawed. The third is another opinion piece by Jimmy Zuma very much in favor of Prop 204, where he goes through the opposition’s objections one by one and shows why he thinks they’re weak arguments. (Hot off the presses: the Weekly’s full-throated endorsement of Prop 204.)

Beyond that, there’s one detail I want to discuss, and that’s the one-half percent sales tax which is being screamed about on television ads and road signs without a mention of what the money will be used for.

I have nothing against taxes in general, though I don’t like sales taxes because they’re regressive. But let’s see what a half cent sales tax means. It means if you spend a dollar, you’d better have a hack saw handy, because you’ll have to cut a penny in half to cover the new tax. If you buy something for a hundred dollars, after you lay five twenty dollar bills on the counter, you’ll have to pull out a couple of quarters as well, because that hundred dollar item is gonna cost you fifty cents extra. That’s what it costs to provide as many as 8,000 children with a quality early childhood education. If you think that’s too much to ask from you, or if you think it will be too large a burden on poor families, many of whom will benefit directly or indirectly from the program, well, that’s your business. I respectfully disagree.

This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2017.

8 replies on “Prop. 204: Planting Preschools in Daycare Deserts”

  1. Thank you, NO.

    Head Start, the most sacrosanct federal education program, doesnt work.

    Thats the finding of a sophisticated study just released by President Obamas Department of Health and Human Services.

    Created in 1965, the comprehensive preschool program for 3- and 4-year olds and their parents is meant to narrow the education gap between low-income students and their middle- and upper-income peers. Forty-five years and $166 billion later, it has been proven a failure.

    http://nypost.com/2010/01/28/head-start-a-…

  2. Ah, the dishonest “guilt trip” technique of political persuasion in full force. On the pro side: happy, adorable preschoolers being well-served by uniformly high-quality education. On the con side, greedy self-serving naysayers willing to cheat little children out of educational opportunities because they’re too cheap to vote in favor of a tiny little 1/2 cent sales tax. Clearly, if you don’t vote for this, you are an OGRE.

    But Safier’s patently unrealistic images of what the proposition will achieve, “giving three and four year old children the kind of educational start in life which will give them the best chance of being successful in school and throughout their lives” are just words: there is nothing in the proposition that puts in place the real-world, on-the-ground, the-money-doesn’t-flow-unless-the-services-are-really-high-quality mechanisms that can guarantee that it’s children — and not irresponsible providers of low quality services and / or cronies of those dispensing funds — that will necessarily benefit from this funding.

    And on the con side, we have not just what Safier represents, lame and baseless speculations and “worst case scenario[s],” we have the actual reality of what has happened and what continues to happen in some of Tucson’s public institutions to large allotments of government funding: desegregation funding, Rio Nuevo funding, 301 funding, 123 funding.

    MORE magic ponies for sale here! Anyone still buying?

  3. The FANTASY Safier and his friends keep promoting is that more taxes and more public funds will translate automatically into better education and better public services for local residents. In some places in the U.S., with different cultures in their public institutions and different kinds of regulatory oversight, they may. But like it or not, the REALITY in Tucson is that until we get more sunlight and healthy public scrutiny on the workings of our institutions and until we clean up some of the ingrained bad behaviors “the Old Pueblo” suffers from, “MORE MONEY” will probably continue to translate into “more waste, more constituents poorly served, more scandals.”

    I read recently in one of the histories of this region published by the University of Arizona Press that an early Jesuit missionary had written of what he observed in the behavior of the commanders of the Presidios, who “decided which local merchants would…supply the troops…usually [the commander’s] kinsmen through blood, marriage, or godparent relationships. Most, if not all, commanders received tidy kickbacks from this arrangement.” Fast forward 250 years: some of the same problems in the power networks, some of the same commentary coming from quarters where people DO care about constituents being well served, but little has changed.

    Pretending these kinds of behaviors don’t exist in our public institution and that the next big allotment of funds will miraculously start to achieve real good without the accountability and oversight mechanisms that are not properly in place in Proposition 204 (and weren’t in place in the last BAD DEAL Proposition Safier promoted, 123) will only dig Tucson deeper into its sad history of dysfunction and sub-standard education.

    Vote no on Proposition 204 and on every Proposition that doesn’t come tightly bundled together with sunlight (transparency requirements) and disinfectant (regulatory oversight and quality control).

    The local networks will keep treating the public like chumps just as long as the public keeps falling for the kind of ludicrous “poor little children” guilt-trip propaganda retailed in this blog, and just as long as the public keeps voting for the un-transparent, Tucson “business as usual” schemes these people put forward.

  5. More welfare and free stuff will certainly fix every problem known to man, just as it has in the past in places like the Soviet Union.

  6. Yes, the proposition “will be a national game changer” but not in the way you describe. This is first and foremost a VOUCHER PROGRAM FOR EDUCATION. Once it is in effect, then tax dollars can then be used for Grades K-8, because “children deserve the best education possible”. Then Middle Schools, then High School.
    While the proposition may portray high-minded ideals, it is a “Gateway Drug” to the demolition of Public Education.
    If the Citizens of Tucson want Universal Pre-K, then they need to have the local Public School Boards actually address the issue rather than trying to do an ‘end run’ with this Proposition.

  7. Yes, TUSD has done such a great job with its existing preschools, created during the Sanchez administration. (Sarcasm.)

    Part of the problem with this proposition is that if Safiers previous speculations about the probable results of its passage are correct some of the money will end up in the hands of that malfunctioning district as an aid to increasing its ever dwindling enrollment and as a way to continue feeding the networks associated with it by recruiting a new cohort of three and four year old students to under-serve. If any institution ever needed as much sunlight and disinfectant as can possibly be prescribed for it, TUSD is it. And, as mentioned in comments above and in the excellent Morlock opinion piece Safier links, the necessary transparency and quality control is entirely missing from Prop 204.

    Vote no.

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