PENDLETON — Michelle Gomez is excited about the potential of a new program designed to provide opportunities for families to access and choose a preschool setting that best meets their needs.

Preschool Promise, which was launched statewide late in 2020 and is aimed at 3- and 4-year-olds, is a model for a publicly funded, high-quality preschool system. It uses local and culturally relevant early child care and education programs and makes them available to children living at 200% of the federal poverty level.

“We are excited for this opportunity for families of young children in our region and right now, we are working hard to get kids signed up,” said Gomez, the coordinated enrollment specialist for the Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub.

Gomez helps fill vacancies in the 11 different Preschool Promise programs, known locally as Blue Mountain Kids, in Morrow, Umatilla and Union counties. Gomez said some of the local Preschool Promise programs are home-based and some are more traditional preschool classrooms.

“The program is also designed to support parents as partners in their child’s learning and development, which is important for student success,” Gomez said.

Launching a program like Preschool Promise would have been challenging under the best of circumstances, but during a worldwide pandemic has presented organizers with a myriad obstacles.

“That’s been a little bit of the challenge of being fully enrolled in some locations, there’s the complication of COVID, and then starting after the beginning of a school year, when a lot of times families already found care or a preschool of some kind,” said Cade Burnette, co-director of Early Learning Services for the Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub. “I think we’re fairly confident that we’ll start recruitment in April, essentially, which aligns with what Head Starts oftentimes do. We’ll get a lot bigger jump on it this year and have a lot of those pieces in place already.”

Both Gomez and Burnette stressed that while Preschool Promise has a specific set of criteria in order to qualify, it’s important to remember that the Blue Mountain Early Learning Hub will assist any family looking for a quality preschool for their child and works with Head Start, private preschool providers, community preschools, school district preschools in order to find the one that fits best for a family.

“(Preschool Promise) is a relatively new program and income can be a challenge,” Burnette said. “There are families that still need the preschool, but if they don’t qualify, with coordinated entry, we try to work with Child Care Resource and Referral to find them something that does work for them. We try not to just say, ‘Sorry, we got nothing for you.’”

Burnette said one of the goals early on is to get the word out about the program and try and coordinate with all existing programs as much as possible, so families don’t have to know the difference between the different preschool providers.

“We can do all of that stuff to figure out what’s the best fit for the family based on what they’re asking for,” he said. “A lot of these are state or federal funded programs, and they have a lot of regulations that go with them. So our goal is to really not have to expect the family to know the differences, but that just based on their individual situations, then we start that out for them.”

To qualify for Preschool Promise programs, children must be 3 or 4 years old on or before Sept. 1 of the program year and must live in Oregon. The annual or previous 12 months income of the child’s family must be at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line. Children in foster care are automatically eligible.