Interest in early learning across the state has seen a large increase over the past few years, leaving lawmakers and early learning leaders questioning how to best provide space and resources to support the growth.
The number of public pre-K classrooms across the state has more than tripled since 2022 and, as of 2025, the state’s Executive Office on Early Learning reported that there are 2,275 available seats for preschool-aged keiki. But as of this month, there are close to 5,000 applications.
EOEL Director Yuuko Arikawa-Cross told state legislators she’s thrilled about the increase in interest for early learning, but is worried the available classroom space and number of seats won’t be able to match the growing demand.
“As of this year, we do have 89 sites and we have 117 classrooms. And so while this is really excellent news, our applications are clearly more than the amount of seats that we have available,” Arikawa-Cross said.
“Right now we are still tracking and looking at access and opportunity across the islands, but we still have a sizable amount of applications per seat in pretty much every community.”
In the last legislative session, the state approved 50 new pre-K classrooms — 25 of which opened last year with the second half set to open during the 2026-2027 school year.
In 2020, the state legislature passed Act 46, which expanded preschool to every eligible three and four-year-old in the state. The measure had benchmarks for EOEL to hit, including creating enough seats for half of Hawaiʻi’s pre-K-aged keiki by 2027, and enough seats for 100% of kids by 2032.
“Right now, it looks like we are very much on track to hit that 2027 target, which we're really excited about,” Arikawa-Cross said.
“But we do need to watch the population if it continues to decline. So it looks very, very likely that we'll hit our 2027 target, and then we're going to have to kind of just watch and see what happens with our population and other factors."
