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Cuts threaten early education gains
by Erick Trevino | June 30, 2026
AZ Daily Star, AZ Republic
A surge in federal pandemic aid helped Arizona finally stabilize its early childhood education system. Now, providers are bracing for cuts that could reverse those gains as that money dries up.
In just four years, early childhood education funding increased by nearly $1 billion — from $727 million during the 2018-19 school year to over $1.6 billion in 2022-23. It has since dropped to $1.2 billion in the 2024-25 school year and is expected to decline further.
That's according to a new report from Read On Arizona, an early literacy improvement initiative launched in 2013.
Most of the funds in 2023 were used to stabilize the early childhood education workforce, with a large sum of the roughly $552 million distributed that year going to support livable wages.
Now, with those funding streams gone, programs may have to forego staff stipends, reorganize classrooms, or see an overall decrease in quality, Lori Masseur told The Arizona Republic. She is the early learning director for Read On Arizona.
'When we had federal COVID relief dollars coming into the state, what we heard anecdotally from several leaders and from different early childhood program providers was: For the first time, Arizona's early childhood system was beginning to be adequately funded.' she said. 'When we began to lose those dollars, there are tough conversations that had to happen around how do we sustain these efforts?'
Its recent Arizona Early Childhood Fiscal Map looked at funding streams for early childhood education across the state. This consists of children from birth to age 5 — or before a child enters kindergarten — as well as early literacy, which is from kindergarten through third grade.
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Source: https://arizonadailystar-az.newsmemory.com/?publink=26ed64c98_135213a