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  Fewer children will have access to pre-kindergarten and state subsidized preschools under the state budget that takes effect Friday.

But the details of those cuts are unclear.

“The result right now is chaos,” said Jean Goodman, executive director at the Guilford County Partnership for Children, the local agency that administers the More at Four pre-K and Smart Start early childhood development funding.

By this point in the summer, Goodman said, her agency usually is able to tell school systems and private day cares how many state-funded pre-kindergarten or subsidized child care slots they’ll have.

Not this year.

It could be well into July or early August before parents know if their children will get into one of those slots as officials try to get a handle on policy changes and budget cuts.

In addition to reducing funding for the pre-K and Smart Start programs, lawmakers moved More at Four out of the state Department of Public Instruction to the Division of Child Development in Department of Health and Human Services.

Officials with the Division of Child Development say they’ll begin sending notices to local agencies late next week.

The state’s $19.7 billion budget will cut Smart Start by 20 percent compared to last year. But a pending bill would limit how the state-level Smart Start agency could parcel out those cuts.

Specifically, it puts limits on the cuts to programs in counties with fewer than 35,000 residents. That means larger counties, such as Guilford, will take a more substantial hit, Goodman said.

Guilford County’s Smart Start program funds 19 programs, including prenatal care, dental hygiene programs and efforts to diagnose and treat children who display developmental and behavior problems while they’re at day care.

Each program will lose some funding. Goodman said one or more programs could be eliminated because of the new statutory “evidence-based” language or because they can’t continue operating on their reduced budgets.

“Each local partnership will have to cut programs. There’s no other away,” said Tracy Zimmerman, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Partnership for Children, which coordinates the public-private Smart Start program on the state level.

As for More at Four, Goodman said Guilford County would at minimum lose 440 of the 2,200 pre-kindergarten slots available last year. Statewide, there were 37,764 children in the More at Four program last year and a similar drop would mean fewer than 30,000 participate this year.

But those cuts are based on funding alone and don’t take into account pending administrative changes. The biggest potential challenge is that all but 20 percent of students in More at Four will have a co-pay. A low-income family of three people could end up paying 10 percent of its annual income toward the program.

“If you’re a family making $16,000 and you’re required to pay 10 percent of your gross income to participate in pre-kindergarten, I’m not certain I as a parent could come up with $1,600 to do so. … That obstacle has been put squarely in front of those families,” said John Pruette, who oversees the More at Four program in the Department of Public Instruction.

Pruette was testifying during a hearing in the Leandro case, a long-running court battle that has given a Wake County judge oversight on whether the state is doing enough to ensure a “sound, basic education” for every student.

A pending decision has added to the uncertainty surrounding child care and pre-K because Judge Howard Manning could stop the transfer of More at Four to the Division of Child Development.

Adding to the complication, Pruette said, is that federally funded programs that also pay for pre-kindergarten programs are not allowed to work with programs that charge money. Public schools blend Title I funding, Head Start funding and state pre-kindergarten dollars to make the economics of a pre-K classroom work, he said.

That won’t be able to happen under a co-pay system, he said.

“It puts a lot of things in jeopardy. … I think what you get at the end of the day is a fractured system that looks like the system did 15 years ago,” Pruette said.

Jani Kozlowski, a policy analyst with the Division of Child Development that will manage pre-kindergarten starting Friday, said schools could continue to pay for pre-kindergarten classrooms as long as the money is accounted for correctly.

“The money would follow the child,” Kozlowski said, adding that as long as no child receiving federal support pays a co-pay, blended classrooms are allowed.

Pruette disagreed, saying public schools will end up with classrooms segregated by their funding source. Lawmakers who designed the policy shift say they think public schools will be able to deal with it in the short term, but acknowledge the long-term effect may be that fewer public school systems offer pre-kindergarten classes.

“I would like to see a lot of it done through the private sector, move to private preschools and leave the public school classrooms to the kindergarten and up,” said Rep. Justin Burr, an Albemarle Republican who was responsible for the Health and Human Services section of the budget. 

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