Law enforcement officials decry state preschool cuts

Cuts to preschool programs could affect as many as 6,205 suburban children, a group of law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Decrying Gov. Pat Quinn's proposed 2011 budget, members of Fight Crime Invest in Kids Illinois released a compilation of research pointing to the savings in prison costs gained by early childhood education.

With $1.4 billion a year now being spent on corrections in Illinois, the group claims that increasing access to preschool for high-risk kids and adding components that address behavior problems could eventually cut prison costs by $350 million a year. How long that might take, however, the group didn't say.

Research released Thursday was gathered by the organization from a number of national studies, as well as Illinois preschool and corrections data.

It included the 2005 Perry Preschool Study, The National Institute of Early Education Research's State of Preschool 2008, and the Pew Center's 2009 study, Behind Bars in America.

"Preschool is just as much about social development as it is about education," Mundelein Police Chief Ray Rose said during a Thursday news conference. "... Aggressive and anti-social behavior are what we're seeing on the street. If we're able to educate kids and their families at an early age, we're educating society at large."

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids Illinois is a local chapter of the national anti-crime organization. Statewide, more than 300 police chiefs, sheriffs, state's attorneys and crime victims are members. The organization outlines four components of crime prevention: early education; parent coaching; effective school and after school coaching; and intervention for troubled and delinquent kids.

This is not the first time the group has rallied against preschool cuts.

The group has released similar data in 2004, 2006 and 2009.

It is, however, the first time early education has seen such drastic cuts in back-to-back years.

A total of 95,300 kids were enrolled in preschool programs funded by the state board of education in 2009. Just shy of 23,000 students came from the suburbs.

Between $38 million in cuts to the state's Preschool for All program last year, and $54 million in proposed cuts on the table this year, preschools face a 24-percent reduction in funding, compared to levels in two years ago.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, a member of the group, remarked, "These are not easy issues and certainly not good times to be in the legislature."

But from his vantage point, with an office in the Cook County Jail, he said, "I can tell you the real ramifications of not doing what was right."

It costs an average of $22,000 a year to keep someone in jail, Dart said, more than several state university's tuition and fees, and more than three times' the state's current per-pupil foundation level of $6,119 per student.

"We're going to be spending a lot more money on people we could have kept out of the system," he said. "We're not going to let this one die for a year."