Dozens of New Mexicans braved a brief snow shower at the Capitol on Monday to rally support for a proposal they believe would help raise school test scores, lower the dropout rate and curb teen pregnancy.

The solution is simple, advocates say: Include early-childhood programs such as pre-kindergarten and home visits for developmentally delayed children in the annual payout to public schools, colleges and universities from the state's more than $10 billion Land Grant Permanent Fund.

"If you spend more on the playpen, you'll spend less in the state pen," Allen Sanchez, executive director of the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops, told a crowd mostly huddled under yellow umbrellas handed out by supporters. Sanchez was referring to the roughly $40,000 a year New Mexico spends to house a prison inmate.

The permanent fund distributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year to K-12 education and higher education. But none of the dollars goes toward early-childhood programs.

That shows a lack of long-term, strategic thinking, given New Mexico's poor education rankings and less-than-stellar performance in other societal measures, supporters say.

Under the proposal, early-childhood programs would receive roughly equivalent to 1.5 percent of the fund's market value. If the fund is valued at around $10 billion, that would produce more than $100 million a year, Sanchez said.

The proposal must clear a couple of hurdles to become a reality, however. First, state lawmakers must approve the proposal. If it passes muster with them, then it would go before New Mexico's voters at the next general election in 2012.

On Monday, advocates began the hard-sell portion of their campaign after whispering about the proposal for weeks. Advocates passed out brochures with a graph based on neuroscientific research that shows a child's linguistic and cognitive abilities developing in the first three years of life.

The implication was clear to Patrick Themig.

"When we invest in early-childhood education, special-education costs go down, grade repetition goes down, crime goes down, teen pregnancy goes down, welfare dependency goes down, job-training costs go down," said Themig of the PNM Resources Inc., who followed Sanchez to the podium Monday. He then contrasted his first litany with a list of items with positive trajectories. "Test scores go up, graduation rates go up, work-force readiness goes up, earning goes up," he said.

Not everyone is a fan of the idea, though.

A spokesman for Gov. Susana Martinez said in an e-mail Monday that the idea is financially irresponsible and "is an example of the sort of financial schemes that have led to our current budget crisis."

The Governor's Office is concerned that more money will flow out each year to the fund's beneficiaries than can be replenished by money flowing into the fund via investment returns.

"The proposed distribution rate exceeds the investment returns to the permanent fund, guaranteeing that it will be eroded over time. In fact, in just 10 years, the fund balance would be reduced by $3 billion," Martinez spokesman Scott Darnell said in an e-mail.

High finance wasn't on Carrie Aiken's mind Monday.

Her 2-month-old son perched in her arms, the Cedar Crest woman liked the idea of more money for early-childhood programs for personal and professional reasons. As a new mother, she is concerned about whether her child will "get the education that he needs," Aiken said. "I'm from New Jersey, where taxes are superhigh but education is fabulous."

As executive director of Christina Kent Early Childhood Center in Albuquerque, Aiken also worries about children who fall into a gap because they don't qualify for various programs.

"Maybe they aren't delayed enough — for lack of a better word — or they aren't diagnosed with something," Aiken said. "They're not at-risk enough, so they don't qualify for services, specifically children who have intense behavioral programs, but they're cognitively, and everything else, so great."

A boost in state spending on early-childhood education likely would benefit those children, she said.

Contact Trip Jennings at 986-3050 or tjennings@sfnewmexican.com.