Can Text Messages Help Families Applying for Early Childhood Education Programs?

High-qual­i­ty ear­ly child­hood oppor­tu­ni­ties can improve a child’s short- and long-term out­comes, but enrolling in ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion (ECE) pro­grams often involves a com­plex, mul­ti-step process. In New Orleans, fam­i­lies apply for pub­licly fund­ed ECE seats through the city’s uni­fied enroll­ment sys­tem, OneApp. After sub­mit­ting their appli­ca­tion online, most ECE appli­cants must pro­vide sup­port­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, in per­son, to ver­i­fy their eli­gi­bil­i­ty for these pro­grams. These require­ments can be chal­leng­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly for dis­ad­van­taged fam­i­lies nav­i­gat­ing the process with lim­it­ed time and resources, and may ulti­mate­ly pre­vent fam­i­lies from enrolling their chil­dren in ben­e­fi­cial ECE pro­grams. In 2016, rough­ly one third of New Orleans par­ents who applied for a pub­lic ECE pro­gram through the OneApp nev­er com­plet­ed the ver­i­fi­ca­tion step. For this study, we part­nered with the dis­trict office over­see­ing the OneApp to iden­ti­fy and address chal­lenges fam­i­lies may face dur­ing the ECE ver­i­fi­ca­tion process. The dis­trict usu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cates with fam­i­lies through­out the process via for­mal, week­ly email reminders to ver­i­fy eli­gi­bil­i­ty, text alerts for week­end ver­i­fi­ca­tion events, and one robo-call reminder to ver­i­fy. Our study exam­ines whether chang­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions with fam­i­lies via week­ly text mes­sages could help par­ents nav­i­gate the process and increase both ver­i­fi­ca­tion and enroll­ment rates. We used two types of texts: some par­ents received texts with infor­ma­tion about the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process, and oth­ers received per­son­al­ized mes­sages with sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion that also includ­ed invi­ta­tions for par­ents to reply with any ques­tions about the process. We then com­pared these two groups’ ver­i­fi­ca­tion and enroll­ment rates to those of par­ents who received the district’s usu­al reminders. Our key find­ings are as fol­lows: Over­all, text-mes­sage reminders increased ver­i­fi­ca­tion rates by up to 7.7 per­cent­age points, from 59.5% to 67.2%. The text mes­sage reminders were par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive for par­ents who applied sole­ly to pub­lic pre‑K pro­grams. For this group, ver­i­fi­ca­tion rates increased by up to 14.5 per­cent­age points, from 67.9% to 82.4%. Effects for Head Start appli­cants were small­er and not sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Per­son­al­ized text-mes­sage reminders also increased enroll­ment for pre‑K appli­cants by 10.1 per­cent­age points, from 62% to 72.1%, while non-per­son­al­ized reminders had no sig­nif­i­cant effect. Almost 90% of fam­i­lies receiv­ing per­son­al­ized text mes­sages engaged with dis­trict staff, pro­vid­ing a real-time glimpse of the spe­cif­ic chal­lenges pre­vent­ing many par­ents from com­plet­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Half of these par­ents asked ques­tions relat­ed to under­stand­ing the process, and one in five men­tioned a logis­ti­cal bar­ri­er lim­it­ing their abil­i­ty to com­plete ver­i­fi­ca­tion. This is the first study, to our knowl­edge, to exam­ine how text-mes­sage sup­port affects ECE ver­i­fi­ca­tion and enroll­ment rates in a cen­tral­ized enroll­ment sys­tem. Our study pro­vides ini­tial evi­dence that sup­port­ing fam­i­lies through the appli­ca­tion process with a low-cost text-mes­sage sys­tem has poten­tial­ly high pay­offs, improv­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion and enroll­ment rates and enabling par­ents to access high-qual­i­ty ear­ly child­hood edu­ca­tion for their children.

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