In the information age, disinformation often spreads quickly. To help keep residents, news media, and other stakeholders well informed, this page will be updated periodically.
Early Childhood
Concerned Citizens Supporting Early Childhood:
What’s the truth?
A few weeks ago, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo proposed letting the voters decide whether to continue funding early childhood education programs in Harris County. The majority of her colleagues on the Commissioners Court did not support her proposal, and there’s been misinformation spreading about her proposal ever since. Below are some questions that to set the record straight about Judge Hidalgo’s proposal.
What was Judge Hidalgo’s proposal that County Commissioners turned down?
On August 7th, 2025, Judge Hidalgo proposed letting the voters decide this upcoming November whether to continue funding existing early childhood programs through a “penny tax.” The average homeowner would have paid $24 more per year in taxes under this proposal. That would have generated $66.2M annually to continue funding early childhood programs and serve over 25,000 kids per year throughout Harris County. The funding would have met some but not all of the existing need for early childhood education in Harris County, allowing voters the opportunity to thoughtfully “stair step” the program’s growth if they so wished in future years.
Has Judge Hidalgo talked about early childhood education before this ballot proposal? It seems like it came out of nowhere.
Judge Hidalgo ran on early childhood during her first campaign in 2018. Since taking office, she has held thirteen town halls with parents, providers and early childhood experts to hear directly from the community about what kind of early childhood education programs they would like to see in the county. She’s held at least a dozen press conferences on early childhood investments, several alongside County Commissioners, and she’s talked about early childhood programs in every one of her State of the County addresses going back to 2019. When asked how the county’s early childhood programs would continue after federal funding expired, the Judge pointed to a ballot item.
Why did Harris County use one-time federal funding for early childhood programs, knowing the funding would run out?
The program was always meant to show proof of concept via the one-time ARPA funding. It takes years to build the infrastructure necessary to successfully provide high-quality early childhood education to 20,000 kids per year. The goal was to build the capacity, and the infrastructure needed to carry out the programs, before asking voters to fund them long-term. The programs exist. And they work. Other jurisdictions, such as Platte County, Missouri; Escambia County, Florida; and Travis County, Texas brought their early childhood proposal to the voters without the preexisting infrastructure to carry out the programs. Early childhood experts around the nation advised Harris County that building the infrastructure first was the more effective “best practice.”
What exactly are the early childhood programs that Harris County has been running?
Since 2022, Harris County has invested more than $149M in 15 programs supporting early childhood education and afterschool care. The programs have been running successfully in every precinct across Harris County. These programs include investments in growing the early childhood education workforce, improving early childhood facilities, and the county’s signature program that creates more high-quality early childhood slots in Harris County. This latter program is the one of the programs that the ballot proposal sought to continue funding.
How has Harris County been paying for these programs?
In 2021, Harris County received $1B from the Biden-Harris Administration as part of the American Rescue Plan (ARPA). A committee, which included representatives from Judge Hidalgo’s office and every County Commissioner’s office, came together to decide the county’s priorities in investing those funds. That committee decided together that the largest single investment out of that $1B should fund early childhood education in Harris County.
Since the county is facing a budget deficit, why not go to the voters with a proposal to fund all services/programs slated to be cut? Why just early childhood education?
In both September of 2024 and August of 2025, Judge Hidalgo and one of her colleagues proposed going to the voters to request funding so the county could fund services that the county might have to cut due to state restraints on county revenue. The other Commissioners declined to support presenting voters with that option. Judge Hidalgo knew that her colleagues were not supportive of a broad ask for the public to fund general services.
Why should Harris County fund early childhood education? Don’t other entities like school districts, private foundations, or the state cover early childhood?
Additional early childhood programs are necessary irrespective of current investments in early childhood education. Some school districts provide pre-K, but those programs only serve kids during the academic year and do not serve children ages 0-2. The Texas legislature recently passed $100M one-time funding for child care throughout the state of Texas, which is a historic investment, but addresses just the tip of the iceberg given the number of families in our state who still need child care. For comparison, Judge Hidalgo’s ballot proposal would have funded over $60M per year, and still would not have covered the full need for childcare in Harris County alone. Harris County has worked for years to ensure that the county is filling the major gaps left by government, nonprofit, or business investments instead of duplicating services. Despite various entities providing early childhood services, at least 17,000 families in Harris County need child care who can’t afford it as of October 2024, according to the Texas Association for the Education of Young Children.
Why did Judge Hidalgo make the early childhood ballot proposal this year?
She chose to make the proposal this year because the one-time federal funds will run out by the end of 2026, which means the programs will stop at the end of next year and thousands of families will lose their child care services. She also wanted to wait until the 2-year independent program evaluation was completed. When the one-time federal funds run out at the end of 2026, the contracts with early childhood providers, evaluators, project managers, and more will expire. That means that the programs will need to shutter completely while the county starts the procurement process anew, a process that will take around 6 months. To avoid the expiration of contracts and a year-long gap in services, voters would have had to make their decision at the ballot box this November 2025. If that had happened, successful contracts could have been renewed.
Have the programs been evaluated?
Yes. Harris County Commissioners contracted an independent evaluator, which conducted an evaluation of the first two years of the county’s program to create more high-quality early childhood slots. The evaluator, Brazelton Touchpoints, was selected after a competitive request for proposals process run by the independent County Purchasing Agent. The evaluation, published in March 2025, found that the program is helping improve economic outcomes for families and that the program is popular with families and kids.
Would voters have supported the proposal, if they had been given the option?
We know that early childhood education programs are broadly popular in Harris County. In a July poll conducted by FM3 with a representative sample of Harris County voters likely to cast ballots in November 2025, 2/3, of Harris County voters said they see a need for additional funding for early childhood programs. FM3 is a well-respected firm that does extensive polling on nonpartisan, issues-based ballot measures.
Is it the case that Judge Hidalgo kept the ballot election proposal from County Commissioners ahead of announcing it?
Judge Hidalgo’s staff met with County Commissioners’ offices weeks ahead of the August 7th Commissioners Court meeting to request feedback on the ballot proposal. In addition, Judge Hidalgo and the County Commissioners, via their staff, have been collaborating on building the existing early childhood programs for years. Furthermore, if the proposal had passed, the members of Commissioners Court would have been able to seek even more feedback and work together on program implementation.
Was Judge Hidalgo’s proposal comprehensive and clearly thought out?
Yes. The proposal builds on programs that have been running successfully for over two years, have yielded a positive evaluation by an independent evaluator and were designed with extensive stakeholder and Harris County Commissioners Court engagement. The Harris County Commissioners have funded a County Division dedicated to the thoughtful and successful administration of the County’s existing early childhood programs since 2022. Early childhood education programs like those in Harris County are a widely accepted part of an individual’s development, as important to academic performance as pre-K and grade school. We know that early childhood investments deliver some of the highest returns of any public program — up to a $9 return on investment for every dollar spent. That’s because kids who receive high-quality early learning support are more likely to graduate high school, avoid the criminal justice system and earn higher wages as adults, according to the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
What happens now?
There’s still hope to build on the years of collaborative work on early childhood education and to continue the successful existing early childhood education programs. If Commissioners agree to put the penny tax proposal on the ballot in November 2026, the county can have the programs up and running again by 2028. This outcome would still be devastating for the families, who will miss at least a year of early childhood education, and for providers whose businesses will be impacted in the meantime, but it’s the best remaining path forward to save these programs and continue funding early childhood education in Harris County.
In 2014, county leaders prevented an early childhood education proposal from going to the voters. This year, county leaders continued that disappointing posture toward this very important issue. The fact that, for over 10 years, county leaders of both parties have refused to even allow the people of Harris County to render a judgment on early childhood education is inexcusable. Perhaps politicians see an early childhood ballot proposal as a political liability, given they would be attaching their name to a proposed tax increase. But early childhood education is a no-brainer for communities around the country and the world. It’s past time to move beyond politics and allow Harris County voters to at least have the opportunity to decide on this!
COVID-19
Overview
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Judge Hidalgo’s proactive, science-based response to the COVID-19 pandemic has saved lives and mitigated the worst impacts of this virus on Harris County. Since day one of the crisis, Judge Hidalgo has erred on the side of action to make sure decisions to protect public health are made in ways that are effective, transparent, and accountable to the people of Harris County. Supporting data and background information, from the number of positive cases to how the county raises and lowers its COVID-19 threat level, has been made accessible and available to residents.
While the effort to support public health interventions will continue for some time to come, false or misleading information can still pervade the public discussion about the County’s response.
Below are some myths and facts made regarding the County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The “Elevate” Vaccine Outreach Contract - Dismissed by the Attorney General of the state of Texas
Judge Hidalgo and the County's Public Health and Emergency Response teams have been working to get our communities vaccinated. One of the approaches they designed to combat vaccine hesitancy was for the kind of work that the County doesn’t do enough of — aggressively reaching deep into communities that have been left behind to persuade them to protect themselves, their families, and their co-workers. In response, the County worked on a proposal for community engagement experts to go deep into low income, vaccine hesitant communities to find out through scientific polling exactly what their hesitancy was about, and work to counter it through canvassing, digital advertising, and direct mail.