For Pat Kordalski, “June 8 is the worst day of the year.” That’s the day prekindergarten lotteries will be held for five Lewiston schools.

“It’s a hard day to stand there and tell parents their child did not get in,” Kordalski said, sighing. “It’s awful.”

The names of 50 to 60 4-year-olds excited to get a jump-start on school will go into a bingo drum and only 24 will be drawn for Geiger Elementary School.

Kordalski, the prekindergarten coordinator for Lewiston schools, will hold two other lotteries that day for four other schools. But Geiger typically has the most entries and the waiting list does not budge. 

“At Geiger, your odds are not great,” Kordalski told one anxious mother during an informational meeting at the school.

“I left crying last year,” Geiger prekindergarten teacher Leela Pollard said about lottery day. 

Lewiston has had to combine pre-K classrooms because of the lack of space.

“We are bursting at the seams. Our enrollment is growing,” Kordalski said. “The minute we build a school, it’s already too small. It happened at Farwell, and it’s happening here at Geiger.”

Farwell had two pre-K classrooms that were needed for kindergarten and first grade. Farwell 4-year-olds now go to Montello school. Geiger had two pre-K classrooms; now there’s one.

At Fairview Elementary in Auburn, the odds are not much better. 

“The demand far outweighs the space we have,” Linda Leiva, consulting teacher for early childhood with the Auburn School Department, said. Five Auburn public schools have pre-K classrooms, and each program will have a waiting list come September.

Fairview held its lottery April 4. Twenty-two children got in. Twenty-eight did not.

“You have people that cry. Some people get angry. Most people understand,” Kordalski said.

Auburn public schools are entering  their seventh year of offering optional prekindergarten. Lewiston is one year behind. Before that, parents had to enroll their children in private programs if they chose to do so.

“I know we have taken some of their (private providers) livelihood,” Kordalski said. 

“We have seen a drop,” said Louise Nunn, a teacher at the Auburn Preschool on Park Avenue for 25 years. 

That drop in enrollment and the attached tuition dollars finally caught up with the school for 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. The preschool that used to have a line out the door and into the parking lot on registration day announced that they were closing their doors.

“I burst into tears when they told me they were closing down,” Tasha Moran, mother of 4-year-old Olivia, said.

Moran wanted the same opportunity for Olivia that she gave her older daughter, Lilyan, who attended Auburn Preschool for two years.

The school planned to close at Christmas break, but the teachers asked the United Methodist Church that supports them to let the kids finish the school year. The teachers cut their salaries and began fundraising to stay open until May. 

Joyce and Moran went to work as well, proposing new ideas and social networking. Parents suggested a website, and the school created one. Joyce raised the importance of an outdoor element, and the school added that, too.

Teachers extended the school day to accommodate more working parents and created a Facebook page to announce events and to display children’s artwork. 

“It’s almost vital,” teacher Kathy Sirois said about social networking. “It puts it in the minds of their friends.”

Those friends and many others threw their support behind the school, and fundraising proved to be quite successful. The teachers started to rethink their decision. 

“If we can get us to May, why can’t we continue?” Nunn said. “The church saw the amount of money we raised in three months and said, ‘we are all on board.””

“I was just ecstatic when I found out they were staying open,” Moran said. 

“The teachers finally realized that they did have a community behind them,” Joyce said.

Whether parents send their child to a private or public preschool, the focus remains the same. “Our goal for pre-K is to get them ready for kindergarten,” Kordalski said.

“We would not have worked so hard to keep the school open if we did not believe in what we are doing,” Nunn said.

Teacher Julie Farnsworth could not agree more. “There is something special about preschool.”