BATON ROUGE — The Baton Rouge Area Foundation said Tuesday that more than $1.1 million will be available for families accessing early childhood education across East Baton Rouge Parish during the 2026-27 school year.

The funding will be made available via stipends to help families afford the cost of care and enable authorized childcare centers to hire more teachers. Families interested in learning if they qualify to access this funding to support tuition expenses in the 2026-27 academic year are asked to visit EBREarlyChildhood.org for more information.

BRAF is working with the Huey and Angelina Wilson Foundation and the Foundation for East Baton Rouge Parish School System to allow for more than 100 children to access care. The triumvirate raised $550,000 to support families, with the state’s Early Childhood Education Fund matching the money raised. 

This is the highest fundraising total for the East Baton Rouge Parish School System, which BRAF says outpaced the next closest year by more than 10 times.

“We are optimistic about the doors this will open for children in our parish,” Superintendent LaMont Cole said. “With support from our philanthropic partners and the state, more families will be able to enroll their kids into programs that get them a jump-start on reading and other developmental milestones.”

BRAF says data they compiled from its Opportunity Data Project shows that, despite near-universal access to pre-K 4 programs, students are still showing up unprepared for kindergarten, with a third of disadvantaged EBR students scoring a zero on the kindergarten readiness exam, while the national average is 13%.

“When we invest in a child’s earliest years, we are not simply funding a classroom – we are building the architecture of a community’s future,” said Chris Meyer, BRAF’s president and CEO. “Quality early childcare and education frees parents to work, lifts up the educators who provide it, and sets children on trajectories that compound over a lifetime. There is no smarter bet Baton Rouge and our state can make.”