By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post
Children in a kindergarten class color sheets that help them learn about the color blue.
Some of those children may know their colors, how to write their name and read fluently. Other children may not even be able to hold the crayon or have ever had a pair of scissors in their hands.
“I don’t believe we see a larger gap anywhere in a student’s K-12 education than we see in kindergarten,” Shanna Dinkel, Hays USD 489 assistant superintendent, said.
As the state changes its accreditation process, more emphasis is being placed on kindergarten and kindergarten readiness in attempts to close these gaps. Hays USD 489 has provided all-day kindergarten for years, but this is the first year all-day kindergarten has been fully funded by the state.
Amanda Meagher, kindergarten teacher at Wilson Elementary School, served on a state committee tasked with making a case for all-day kindergarten.
“We talked about a lot of reasons and research that showed we need that time and opportunity for some teacher-led play. They just needed to be here all day,” she said. “It is hard to do that in a half day — to get to the academics and the growth of the child and to meet the needs of the individual child when it was such a short amount of time that you were with them.”
Kindergarten is a year of transition. It is supposed to be more like preschool at the beginning of the year and more like grade school at the end of the year. There is no other grade like that, Meagher said. Children learn basic classroom skills, such as keeping supplies neat, brining back notes and folders, and being a part of the communication process with their parents.
“Transitioning with their fine motor skills and work habits, hopefully sets them up for success and gets them excited about learning and become lifelong learners,” she said.
The kindergarten program itself will not change. The district had been using at-risk funds to support the all-day program, but those funds can now be used in other at-risk programs, Dinkel said. Those dollars have been diverted to pay for classroom aides at each elementary school and regular education paraeducators at the middle school and high school. The kindergarten fee was also eliminated as a result of state funding.
Dinkel and other experts agree kindergarten and pre-kindergarten are essential times for children’s learning and development.
Donna Hudson-Hamilton, director of the Early Childhood Connections program, said children’s brains develop at a staggering rate during early childhood. Ninety percent of children’s brain development occurs before the age of 5. Children have about twice the number of brain synapses as an adult until they are about 10 years old and then the brain starts to pare back in adolescents.
“If we lose that opportunity, that is not an opportunity that we can get back. If you have 90 percent of your brain developing at that time, we want to give that the best we have for the child,” Hudson-Hamilton said.
Children who receive early childhood education are more likely to graduate from high school on time and only 15 percent of children who receive early childhood education require special education services — compared to 34 percent of those who do not.
Early childhood education makes economic sense, as well. For every dollar spent on early childhood education, the state saves $7 in later interventions.
A long-term study found at age 27, children who participated in early childhood programs were four times more likely to be earning more than $2,000 per month, three times as likely to own a home and twice as likely to have never been on welfare as an adult.
However, the investment the U.S. is making in early childhood education does not match the potential for development at this age. Despite the great leaps a child’s brain makes between birth to age 5, the U.S. dedicates the least money to education during this time.
The district has a kindergarten readiness committee that includes staff from the district’s Early Child Connections program, kindergarten teachers and representatives of other preschools in the city. The group works with parents and preschools to help close the gaps kindergarten teachers are seeing as children enter grade school.
A few years ago, the focus was on toilet training. More recently, the committee worked on helping children develop the fine motor skills to hold pencils.
Balancing gaps between students can be tricky, Meagher said.
“It is all about meeting the child where they are at. You focus in on what each child needs. It is like an individual plan for each child. You know this child may need help with fine motor skills, so you provide help with play-based learning or your learning lab activities where you give them lots of opportunities for them to grow in their fine motor skills,” she said.
A lot of what Meagher’s committee talked about was growing social and emotional skills and giving children time to learn through play. This is mirrored in the state board of education’s new assessment goals.
The state has developed a survey tool to help assess where children are developmentally as they come into kindergarten, which it will start to administer to incoming kindergarteners in fall 2018. The developmental snapshot, called the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, looks at a child’s development in the areas of language and literacy, cognitive and problem solving, physical well-being and motor development, and social-emotional development.
“Our kindergarten teachers do a great job of bridging that gap, but the better the kids come prepared for kindergarten, the further we can take them throughout the year,” Dinkel said. “Academics are very important, but we also need to make sure the social, emotional development is there as well.”
Hudson-Hamilton said the children’s soft skills, such as being able to work with other students, follow directions, ask questions appropriately, are skills students will need throughout their lives to be successful.
The preschool programs focuses much on rules and routines and has implemented a program called Slide that helps the children further transition from a preschool to a kindergarten setting. Children learn skills, such as how to work independently and how to raise their hands.
The new mission of the state board is to develop individual plans of study for each student that helps them close gaps and challenge them where ever they are at, Dinkel said.
“I think it is exciting that we are focusing on it at the state level because it definitely is very, very important to the start of school and how we start and kids end kindergarten really sets them on the path through the rest of our K-12 system,” Dinkel said.
The state’s new accreditation standards also is pushing for full-day Head Start within the next five years. All-day preschool is also listed among the Hays USD 489 school board goals.
This year, Early Childhood Connections has three classrooms that are full day.
“The children are somewhere during that time,” Hudson-Hamilton said. “We will be providing the same rest time and snack time as if they were in another setting. There is more opportunity to interact with them. For the children who don’t need to nap who are really getting ready to go on to kindergarten, we get to do some more direct instruction with them. It is going to give a little bit more opportunity to diversify what we can do for the child.”
Play is the children’s work at this age, Hudson-Hamilton said. It may look as if the children are just playing, but the early childhood teachers have a set, intentional curriculum.
“You may come into a classroom, and they might be doing a cooking activity,” Hudson-Hamilton said, “but as a part of that cooking activity, they may be counting out how many ingredients that go into the cooking activity. They may be working on predictions — what’s going to happen when we do this? What is going to happen when we add heat to it?”
ECC has 120 students ages 3 through 5 in its program at the former Washington School in Hays. However, the program works with children as young as infants at its Munjor program and through home-based services.
Although the state board and the Kansas Legislature has made strides in supporting early childhood education, more still needs to be done, Hudson-Hamilton said.
“I do think it is important for people to advocate for this population because they don’t have their own voices yet, so we need to be speaking on their behalf,” she said.