Many of New York's inner city schools have offered government-funded prekindergarten since the 1960s. In 1997, New York state passed legislation to offer pre-K across the state.

In 2021 and 2022 millions more approved in state funding to the New York State Department of Education that took pre-K to even more school districts and with the full day option for families through a lottery system.

Is the full-day program financially sustainable and will it be expanded even further to accommodate more families? Educators say only time will tell.

One of the state's brand new, full-day pre-K programs is at East Syracuse-Minoa Central School District, where pre-K teacher Cara Galle works will a busy class of 4-year-olds.

“This is where we kind of model and pretend to do our adult jobs. being a mom or a dad, we might be a pizza maker," said Galle. “We might have a birthday party at some point. Right now they have their babies to take care of.”

Galle's been teaching for 31 years.

“One of the nice luxuries about having a full day is that we can actually take the time to actually play in the areas with the children, and model, you know, what appropriate play looks like and also use a lot of language with them. I love it,” Galle says.

New York state invested more than a billion dollars in the last two years in full day pre-K

“The full-day expansion pre-K funding allowed us to actually open full-day sections of pre-K while maintaining half-day sections for those who would opt to choose a half-day section. In doing so we were required initially to commit to 20 full-day seats. We optimally were able to open 90 seats,” said Dr. Donna DeSiato, superintendent of East Syracuse-Minoa Central School District.

“The development of the brain is really at its peak between ages three, four, and five. So we really do want to capitalize on 4-year-olds starting at that early start, gives students that ability to have both the not only the academic portion and the social-emotional learning along with gross motor fine motor [skills]," she continued. “In the past, we would talk about how is the character feeling in a story and when they would say oh, he feels bad or he feels good, but when are socially emotionally they're learning words like he's feeling happy, he's disappointed or he's worried."

Educational play during a full day of pre-K makes for a very busy day.

Galle breaks down the day's schedule. The routine is the same, but the focus of the learning changes.

“Two separate choice times and then we also have what's called our creativity corridor, which is another free choice play time," says Galle. "We have lunch and breakfast also we have the opportunity to play outside twice.”

Educators say these experiences and now 4-year-olds being able to attend full day will help to close the COVID gap.

“With COVID, a lot of our kids didn't have exposure to a lot of things. You know, they didn't get to have those friendship groups and things like that just with the nature of how COVID was and how isolating it could be at times. And I think just for social skills and how do you know play school, how to follow routines and procedures. This is going to be huge for them," said Pam Buddendeck, principal of Park Hill School.