Pre-K 4 SA and JBSA: Partnering to Serve Our Service Members
By partnering with Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA), Pre-K 4 SA is working to ensure service members get the child care support they need and their children get the best possible start in life.
Our 2025 Fiesta medal represents this commitment and celebrates the many contributions military families make to our communities.
Priority Enrollment
Military-affiliated families living in San Antonio receive priority enrollment and attend Pre-K 4 SA for free.
Expanded Child Care Options
We’re providing resources and training to help expand access to affordable, high-quality options, including Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood (MCCYN-PLUS) providers.
Shared Expertise
Pre-K 4 SA and JBSA are sharing best practices and training opportunities to attract, develop, and retain top talent in the field of early childhood education
Support for Military Transitions
JBSA will connect transitioning military members and their families with resources, including Pre-K 4 SA, that help them navigate this important life change.
Pre-K 4 SA, Joint Base San Antonio Partner to Expand Military Families’ Child Care Access
Improve the workforce
Help secure our economy
Create opportunities for citizens
Improve economic mobility
Strengthen family and civic engagement
Pre-K 4 SA does not compete with the state’s public pre-k system. It complements it, expands who can be served, and operates through the same partnership model Texas is increasingly promoting.
1. Texas provides funding intended to support full-day prekindergarten for eligible four-year-olds.
Texas requires school districts to provide full-day prekindergarten for eligible four-year-olds. While the school finance formula continues to generate one-half day of attendance funding for each eligible pre-K student, the state provides additional funding to support the second half of the day. Beginning with the 2025-26 school year, the Legislature revised this funding mechanism to more directly align full-day pre-K funding with districts’ actual enrollment of eligible four-year-olds.
2. Pre-K 4 SA works in partnership with public school districts.
Children attending Pre-K 4 SA may also be enrolled through a participating public school district, allowing the district and Pre-K 4 SA to work together to serve eligible children. This type of partnership extends public prekindergarten beyond a traditional school district classroom while preserving the connection between the child and the public school system. The Pre-K 4 SA model for partnering with the districts was adopted by the Legislature in 2019 as a model for the state.
3. Texas is actively encouraging the expansion of pre-K partnerships.
Recent legislation has strengthened the state’s commitment to partnerships between public school systems and qualified early learning providers.
In 2025, the Legislature created a statewide system of Pre-K Partnership Intermediaries to help school systems and providers develop and expand these partnerships. Beginning with programs operating in 2027-28, school systems seeking certain expansions of public pre-K must first consider qualified community-based providers and receive a determination from a state-designated partnership intermediary.
4. Pre-K 4 SA expands access beyond the children served through traditional public prekindergarten.
Eligibility for free public prekindergarten is established by state law and is limited to children who are economically disadvantaged, emergent bilingual, experiencing homelessness, in or formerly in foster care, children of active-duty military members, children of Star of Texas Award recipients, and children of classroom teachers employed by the district. Since inception, Pre-K 4 SA has served a broader population including military veterans and reservists, moderate-income families, and children with exceptional needs. Pre-K 4 SA provides an affordable option for families who do not qualify for public pre-k and cannot afford it in the private sector.
5. Pre-K 4 SA has helped increase public prekindergarten enrollment.
When Pre-K 4 SA launched in 2013, only 46.8% of eligible four-year-olds in San Antonio enrolled in public prekindergarten. By 2018, enrollment had increased to 61.3%, substantially outpacing growth in other major Texas urban areas. A study by the Urban Education Institute at UTSA identified Pre-K 4 SA as an important contributor to that increase. By 2022, 90% of eligible four-year-olds in San Antonio were enrolled in prekindergarten. Access for three-year-olds remained far more limited because Texas does not require school districts to offer prekindergarten to eligible three-year-olds. Pre-K 4 SA began serving three-year-olds in 2023 to help close that gap. By the 2024-25 school year, enrollment of eligible three-year-olds in public prekindergarten had increased to 20% primarily because of Pre-K 4 SA serving approximately 1,000 three-year-olds annually. Pre-K 4 SA continues to expand access by working alongside public school districts and high-quality child care providers to create more opportunities for San Antonio’s youngest learners.
SOURCES
- Texas Education Agency. House Bill 2 (HB 2) Implementation: Foundation School Program Funding Formula Changes.
- Texas Education Agency. Prekindergarten Registration and Enrollment.
- Texas Education Agency. Prekindergarten Partnerships.
- Texas Education Agency. Early Childhood Education FAQs.
- Villarreal, M. U. (2019). Impact Study of Prekindergarten for San Antonio (2019). Urban Education Institute at UTSA.
The State Still Does Not Directly Fund Full-Day Pre-K
HB 3 (2019) required districts to offer a full day of pre-K instruction to eligible four-year-olds, but formula funding stayed at the half-day rate. Districts were provided additional funding, known as the Early Learning Allotment, but this funding was insufficient to cover all required expenses, including full-day pre-k, reading academy training for all K-3 teachers, and high dosage tutoring programs. Districts had to cover the difference using grants, federal Title I dollars, and local funds redirected from other needs.
The 2025 session’s major school-finance bill, HB 2, changed how the Early Education Allotment is distributed among districts to encourage districts to apply the funds to full-day prekindergarten, but it did not correct the underlying half-day formula. Funding for three-year-olds remains at ½ day with no additional funding to expand to full-day. For this reason, few San Antonio area districts offer pre-k to three-year-olds outside of Head Start classrooms.
State Eligibility Remains Narrow
Public schools are permitted to serve only a portion of prekindergarten students. Eligibility categories are limited to income below 185% of the federal poverty guidelines, homelessness, foster care, emergent bilingual status, active-duty or killed in action military, Star of Texas Award, and children of classroom teachers. By design, Pre-K 4 SA is open to any three- or four-year-old in San Antonio with priority given to low- and middle-income, military connected, homeless, and children in foster care.
Eligibility Category | Pre-K 4 SA | Public School Districts |
|---|---|---|
Low income (<185% FPL/ ≈57% SMI) | ✓ | ✓ |
Middle income (186-220% FPL/ 85% SMI) | ✓ | — |
Active-duty military | ✓ | ✓ |
Military veterans | ✓ | — |
Military reserve | ✓ | — |
Child of armed forces member
killed in action | ✓ | ✓ |
Homeless | ✓ | ✓ |
Foster care | ✓ | ✓ |
Emergent bilingual | ✓ | ✓ |
Children of teachers | ✓ | ✓ |
Children of Star of Texas
Award recipients | ✓ | ✓ |
Children with exceptional needs | ✓ | — |
4-year-olds, full day | ✓ | ✓ |
3-year-olds, full day | ✓ | Half Day Only |
HB 2 (2025) Tightened Districts’ Ability to Serve Beyond State Eligibility
Before HB 2, districts with open seats could offer tuition-based pre-K to families outside the state’s free-eligibility. This had the unintended consequence of destabilizing private child care for children under the age of three. To correct this, HB 2 narrowed school districts’ ability to serve children beyond those who are eligible for free public pre-kindergarten.
Starting in the 2027–2028 school year, a district may only offer tuition-based pre-K if one of the state’s newly designated intermediary organizations first confirms that no eligible private child care provider is available to serve the child. The same new intermediary sign-off is now required before a district can build or repurpose a classroom to serve pre-k students at all.
Texas Currently Does Not Require Quality in Pre-K
The National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) tracks ten minimum quality benchmarks for state pre-K programs nationally. Texas met four of the ten as recently as the 2022–2023 school year; after the Legislature loosened teacher-credential requirements in 2023 (HB 2729, allowing associate degrees in place of a bachelor’s degree), Texas dropped to just two of ten benchmarks in 2024. NIEER also ranks Texas 40th nationally in per-child pre-K spending.
Conversely, Pre-K 4 SA was built with high-quality at its core. Pre-K 4 SA Education Centers are NAEYC accredited and meet all 10 NIEER benchmarks. Additionally, external evaluations consistently demonstrate that Pre-K 4 SA delivers exceptionally high-quality early education that results in children being more than kinder ready.
Pre-K 4 SA Kindergarten Readiness 1
Source: Westat (2026). Pre-K 4 SA Education Centers: Year 12 (2024-2025) Evaluation Brief
Only 20% of Eligible 3-Year-Olds are Being Served
When Pre-K 4 SA launched in 2013, only 46.8% of eligible four-year-olds in San Antonio enrolled in public prekindergarten. By 2018, enrollment increased to 61.3%, far outpacing other urban areas in Texas. A study by the Urban Education Institute in Texas attributed this rapid rise to the presence of Pre-K 4 SA.
Source: Villarreal, M.U. (2019) Impact Study of Prekindergarten for San Antonio (2019). Urban Education Institute at UTSA.
By 2022, 90% of eligible four-year-olds in San Antonio were enrolled in prekindergarten. For three-year-olds, the story was very different. Only 12% of eligible three-year-olds were enrolled in public pre-K, largely because so few school districts offered prekindergarten to three-year-olds. Low-income families who wanted an alternative faced another barrier; the waiting list for a child care scholarship that would let them enroll in a participating private child care center numbered in the thousands, leaving most families with few real options.
Pre-K 4 SA began admitting three-year-olds in 2023 to help close that gap. By the 2024-25 school year, three-year-old enrollment in public prekindergarten had risen to 20%, an increase driven almost entirely by the roughly 1,000 three-year-olds Pre-K 4 SA serves each year. Pre-K 4 SA remains committed to expanding access by working through partnerships with school districts and high-quality child care providers to reach more three-year-olds.
Early Learning is Far More than Prekindergarten
While enrollment in prekindergarten is important, early learning is much more than a single year of classroom instruction before kindergarten. It is the accumulation of experiences, relationships, and skill-building that begins at birth, long before any child is old enough to qualify for a pre-K seat. An estimated 90% of a child’s brain growth happens before age five. Foundational skills such as language, self-regulation, early literacy and numeracy are already taking shape in infancy and toddlerhood. By the time a child walks into a prekindergarten classroom, three to four years of the most critical developmental window have already passed, largely outside the reach of any coordinated public system.
Neither the private market nor state policy has closed the structural gap in early learning. What makes San Antonio a national leader in early learning is we did not wait for state policy or the market to catch up with brain research. The visionary Brainpower Task Force designed Pre-K 4 SA to address the full early learning age span, not just the single year the state funds. That design shows up in how the program operates: infant and toddler classrooms at its newest campus, citywide coaching and quality-certification support for nearly 100 independent child care providers serving children well below pre-K age, and professional development open to early learning educators across San Antonio, regardless of what age group they teach. Where state law treats early education as a single grade level, San Antonio built a program around the idea that birth to five is one continuous developmental period and that a city serious about school and career readiness has to invest in all of it, not just the year immediately before kindergarten.
On April 12, over 14,000 people across San Antonio and South Texas visited Joint Base San Antonio (JBSA)-Fort Sam Houston for the Great Texas Freedom Fest. The free event gave the public a chance to explore and learn about JBSA while enjoying an afternoon of family activities, military displays, and demonstrations.
All military branches were represented, along with the local fire, police, and sheriff’s departments. Visitors could see a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and M1 Abrams tank up close, climb inside an A-4 Skyhawk cockpit, and explore several models of tactical and emergency response vehicles.
- U.S. Air Force photo by Tristin English
The festival’s theme, “United in Service,” celebrated the power of collaboration between military branches, the City of San Antonio, civilian partners, and the San Antonio community. We at Pre-K 4 SA are proud to take part in this collaboration, formally partnering with JBSA to support San Antonio’s military families.
Military families face a range of unique circumstances—from long days and irregular hours to changes of station, deployments, separation, and countless other scenarios—that can make it a challenge to find reliable child care.
As a public early education leader in a city with a strong military presence, Pre-K 4 SA has a duty to use our resources to help address military families’ child care needs. That’s why children of military families attend Pre-K 4 SA free and receive priority enrollment.
Pre-K 4 SA has worked closely with JBSA for years to better serve military families. As our formal partnership strengthens, we can reach an unprecedented level of collaboration between San Antonio’s military and child care communities to ensure our military families are getting the best care possible.
Exhibit Opening Reception
Thursday, April 17, 2025 | 5 – 7 PM
Central Library | 600 Soledad St
District 9 & District 10 Trunk or Treat
835 W Rhapsody Dr, San Antonio, TX 78216