In her January
2023 State of the State Address, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer proposed evolving the state’s
Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP) into free pre-K for all Michigan 4-year-olds. In 2023 and 2024, as part of Whitmer’s
PreK for All taskforce,
Policy Equity Group helped gather feedback from parents, child care providers, early childhood education professionals, and intermediate school districts to inform a
Roadmap for implementing PreK for All. On May 13, 2025, Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential (
MiLEAP) announced that no-cost, high-quality pre-K is now open to all families, regardless of income, for the 2025-26 school year.
Early Education Matters recently spoke with Jeffrey Capizzano, president and founder of Policy Equity Group, about the PreK for All rollout and the barriers that may impact its future success.
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Jeffrey CapizzanoQ. How is the rollout of Michigan’s PreK for All program going?
A. The state is taking the Roadmap very seriously, and they seem to be following the steps as closely as they can. We had some really good wins in the legislature last year. We've gotten a pretty sizable increase in the per child allocation for GSRP. The state ended up allowing Head Starts to participate in GSRP without having to meet the current standards — they consider Head Start standards to be appropriate and high quality. So, it allows more Head Start programs to participate.
Overall, we're really happy with the Roadmap and the way it's been applied in the implementation of PreK for All. We’d like to see family child care providers be a part of it. There's going to be a family child care pilot funded through the state's
Preschool Development Grant, which is going to be an important first step to that. I am really, really excited about that. I think it's promising.
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One way to ensure quality pre-K is to better compensate early education teachers.
Q. What are the hot topics being discussed by Michigan's early education professionals?
A. We run a
Community of Practice of early childhood advocates and programs and system-level stakeholders. We've identified three things that we want to be focusing on. The first is around wages for early childhood educators, this perennial problem of not being able to compensate our providers in a way that will keep them in the field. It's really hard to build a high quality early childhood system if you have such incredible amounts of turnover from the teachers.
Second, we're also advocating for things like making child care providers categorically eligible for a child care subsidy. It's ironic that so many child care providers can't afford care for their own children. That does not make any sense. And third, thinking about this notion of how do you make the child care subsidy more accessible to families in general? How do you make it easier for them to navigate the eligibility process? Once they get the subsidy, how do you help them find providers that accept subsidies? How do you get more child care providers to accept the subsidy? And then thinking about how the child care subsidy system fits within the broader system, and how can we align things better? All of those sorts of things might make it easier for families to get the supports they need to become economically self-sufficient.
The Community of Practice represents all of these different areas of the system, from providers to advocacy organizations, and organizations that implement some of the programs. We welcome state policy makers to come and talk to the Community of Practice, to learn from them, to hear them. The ideal is to have practice-informed policies that are really driven by an understanding of how it works on the ground. We want to support policymakers. We want to welcome them to the Community of Practice anytime they want to come.
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PreK for All is blending with some Head Start programs and piloting a home child care model that includes preschool instruction for 4-year-olds.
Q. How are federal funding cuts impacting early education in Michigan?
A. We are concerned about the federal threats to Head Start. In the governor's vision for providing pre-K for all four-year-olds in the state, Head Start is a big part of that vision. if you start to take funding away from Head Start at the federal level, it's going to make it much more difficult for that vision to be achieved. PreK for All becomes pre-K for some. Programs on the ground are doing a really great job blending Head Start and GSRP funding into these blended models, providing the best of both programs. And so, that's another thing that's at risk.
There's an elaborate process going on in Congress called budget reconciliation. The first step of budget reconciliation is the House and the Senate pass budget resolutions that are essentially commitments to how they are going to cut the deficit and fund programs. The Energy and Commerce Committee has committed to cutting $880 billion of the deficit over the next 10 years. Medicaid is under the purview of that committee. So, we're very obviously concerned about Medicaid. The Committee on Agriculture has really big commitments to cuts. That's where
SNAP is, our food security programs. Then you've got the Workforce Committee, with all of the education programs committing to cuts.
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Michigan has set a bold goal to deliver access to high-quality PreK to all 4-year-olds in the state.
We saw a
leaked document from the Department of Education showing zeroing out the Head Start program — the president actually put out in his budget the elimination of Head Start. The president doesn't get to determine appropriations. Obviously, that's up to Congress. So, we're anxiously watching the way that Congress goes through its budget process and what it means for Head Start. Any cut to the Head Start program would be devastating for Michigan.
About $407 million of funding from Head Start is flowing to Michigan, which represents about 30% of all of the early childhood money. That is an incredibly large amount of money. Imagine trying to figure out how to keep a system going without 30% of the funding. If you think about all the early childhood money, the [federal]
Child Care and Development Block Grant funds GSRP, the state’s pre-K program.
There are about 28,500 Head Start slots in Michigan. It's a big hit directly for those kids. It's a big hit for GSRP, because of the way that funds are blended. And it's a big hit for multi-service organizations where Head Start represents a big aspect of their budget. There are Head Start programs in Detroit, for example, that are also food banks and apprenticeship programs. They do a lot of different things. If you take out the Head Start funding from their operating budget, it's going to make it really difficult for them to be able to do the other things that they're committed to do, feeding the city, things like that. This is no joke. This is a big deal and very bad.
Estelle Slootmaker is project editor for Early Education Matters. You can contact her at [email protected].
Photos by Nick Hagen at All of Gods Children Developmental Learning Center in Detroit.
This article is part of Early Education Matters, a series about how Michigan parents, childcare providers, and early childhood educators are working together to create more early education opportunities for all little Michiganders. It is made possible with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.