INDIANAPOLIS – Immigration activists are crying foul because illegal immigrants do not qualify for a state-run preschool pilot program, or an Indianapolis preschool program sponsored by Mayor Greg Ballard.

Last Friday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan decided to speak out about the situation.

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“Indiana is rightfully proud of its steps to expand preschool programs and elevate quality, but it’s shortsighted and wrong to deny children educational opportunity from the starting line because of their immigration status – especially children who are clearly here through no fault of their own,” Duncan said in a press statement Friday.

“There is no better bang for our buck educationally than preschool, and we need more children in America getting an early start – not fewer,” he continued. “Nothing in federal law requires state or local preschool programs to exclude any child from participation on the basis of their immigration status, and doing so just doesn’t make sense.”

Indiana officials seem to disagree.

U.S. citizenship is required for the state’s other early childhood programs because of funding requirements, and applying the same criteria to the new state-sponsored On My Way preschool pilot program “maintains consistency,” Indiana Family and Social Services spokesman Jim Gavin told Chalkbeat.

“The Child Care and Development Fund and Early Education Matching Grant programs also require that the eligible child be a citizen,” he said.

Beth Stroh, United Way of Central Indiana administrator for Indianapolis’ preschool program also said limited eligibility was a funding issue.

“I don’t think that anybody was consciously saying, ‘We want to exclude or not be welcoming,’ but there were some boundaries that we had to identify in terms of who could we serve with public dollars and federal dollars,” Stroh told the news site.

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Federal law requires schools to give all children equal access to public education, and school officials cannot discriminate based on citizenship, but the law does not apply until kindergarten, Chalkbeat reports.

And the number of illegal immigrant children who could be excluded is minuscule.

“Children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country without permission, which are estimated to account for 88 percent of all children of immigrant parents, are U.S. citizens by birth and therefore welcome into the program,” according to Chalkbeat. “And so are refugees with legal status. Indiana is estimated to have 10,000 foreign-born children under age 16 who are not U.S. citizens, according to the Migration Policy Institute.”

The whole situation has Indianapolis immigration attorney Fatima Johnson very upset.

“It’s a shame,” Johnson told Chalkbeat. “They’ll be behind everyone else. If only a portion of kids are kindergarten-ready, how much money and resources do you have to spend later to catch the kids up?”

Johnson also spoke with ABC 6.

“When access is cutoff you are essentially telling the person that you don’t matter,” Johnson said. “It’s not important enough for us. You are giving us hoop after hoop for us to jump through. It is really frustrating to them.”

Melanie Brizzi, Indiana’s director of Early Childhood and Out of School Learning, told the site On My Way is currently a pilot program that still in its infancy.

“We would love for every low-income child to have access to high-quality early education,” she said. “We know what a difference that will make. This pilot program is designed to study data and craft a program to do that and to find how we can improve children’s lives.”

Brizzi said there are currently 33,000 open slots for local school district and federal Head Start preschool programs that do not require proof of citizenship.

Meanwhile, some school officials don’t seem to be having any problem accommodating all 4-year-olds.

According to Chalkbeat:

Wayne Township, on Indianapolis’ West side, is a participant in the state’s On My Way preschool program. Superintendent Jeff Butts said the district accepts all students for its preschool program. But if they don’t qualify for the state preschool program they can still get tuition help through a federal poverty program. The district’s preschool offers 80 preschool spots funded by the federal grant. Citizenship is not a requirement for that program.