WSHU: Connecticut's new law requires kindergarten students to be five by Sept. 1, instead of the previous cutoff, January 1. Why is that a problem for parents?
JH: That's mainly a problem because about a third of all kindergarten students have that late birthday. So now parents across the state are scrambling, trying to figure out if they can go to preschool an extra year. They’re asking themselves, will we have to pay out of pocket for a year of daycare? And trying to navigate that struggle, if a kid can't go to kindergarten next year, and that's what you were anticipating, what are you going to do for those eight months in between when they can go to kindergarten?
WSHU: Now you focused on Moriah Lopez and her son, who turned four in December. Can you tell us what problems she's having trying to figure it out? She's from New Haven.
JH: Yes. So she told me that she had heard about this change and that her son wouldn't be able to go to kindergarten because of this age change. But it was never communicated to her why this was changed, and what are the next steps. And so when she learned about this in the fall, she was looking for websites and any information, and she couldn't find it.
One of the big challenges is the Department of Education has kind of taken the hands-off approach of, 'Okay, we'll leave it up to every district for how they want to navigate this change and if they want a waiver process.' So Lopez was looking everywhere for this information. She said that she was on the district website and couldn't find anything. And it wasn't until she wrote an op-ed that she said that she finally started hearing answers from other parents and teachers. And finally the district in January released what it was planning to do for the kindergarten waivers. But for weeks, she had no idea what the district wanted to do and what her avenue was going to be going forward.
WSHU: Now how is this different from the other school districts? Because you were saying that the state Department of Education has taken a hands-off approach. So each district is left on its own to try and figure out how to inform parents and how to implement this. So how is it different from district to district?
JH: For Lopez in New Haven, her son was enrolled in pre-K-4 already in the New Haven school district. And so their waiver model said, 'Well, if your kid is already in pre-K-4, automatically, he's going to kindergarten next year.' And then you see things like in Westport, a parent just has to have written consent saying I want my kid in kindergarten, and they're going to grant that automatically. And then you see districts like West Hartford, where they're doing very strict evaluation models, looking at how a child acts emotionally, socially, behaviorally; can he hold a pencil? Can he count to 10? And seeing if they're age-appropriate to go into kindergarten.
WSHU: Now, the Connecticut Project Action Fund released a report just this month talking about the whole idea of having different standards for eligibility for kindergarten, could you just tell us what the report found? And about what's going on in Connecticut as far as that's concerned?
JH: Yeah. So the report had two different aspects of it. First, a survey was sent out to superintendents just asking, how are you navigating this change? Is it a good change? Is it a bad change? What are some difficulties with this? So that was the first aspect of this report. The survey showed that most superintendents, I think they had 98 school district superintendents, responded to this survey saying like, we need more funding; that's our biggest challenge. If we have to open more pre-K classes, we need teachers to hire and if we're stripping that from kindergarten, that's another challenge. That was one of the things that they talked about in that survey.
And then the second part of the report was they just had people go to every district website and try to find these answers on the website. And they were only able to find, I think, 60% of school districts had this information readily available on their websites. So the second part is that this information is hard to find and a lot of districts still don't know what they're doing. The report illustrated that as well.
WSHU: You also found out from talking to the different school districts, that they're all quite open to helping parents navigate this. What are they saying and what are they doing?
JH: Yeah, I mean, one thing that I thought was really interesting was with Groton, they've had this transitional kindergarten model where for at least five or six years, they've looked at four-year-olds who are ready for kindergarten and said, okay, we have a model called transitional kindergarten where it's basically a kindergarten model, but it's developmentally appropriate for four-year-olds.
So you're still going to have the bus pick them up, you're still going to have lunch at school, there's still after-school programs for these children, but it's just tailored to a four-year-old rather than a five-year-old. And then at the end of that model, they can either be recommended to kindergarten saying, okay, now you're ready for that. Or if they're a little bit ahead, now they can go to first grade. So that was one interesting model that one school district is doing to kind of ease that transition into this. And another one was Fairfield, which is offering a new pre-K program, where they're giving priority to these children who are maybe ready for kindergarten, but not quite at that five-year-old mark yet.
WSHU: So basically, as we look forward to September, from your reporting, what do you think we can anticipate?
JH: I talked to some experts, especially Fran Rabinowitz, who was saying, honestly, if we had just one more year, this could be so much easier. And so I think that's the big struggle is districts are kind of saying how do we make this happen, only having one year to make it happen? And so I mean, that's the hope is that you get as many kids in as you can, if they are requesting the waiver.
I mean, especially in bigger districts like Bridgeport and Hartford, where you have maybe 600 students being affected by this, that's kind of their approach is like, okay, let's just approve as many kids as we can for this waiver now, and we'll work for a better solution next year when we have a little more time. So I think the districts are doing everything they can at that point. But from the experts I spoke with, it's really hard to make something like this happen in a year and they're advocating at least for the department or the legislature to push it back one more year for implementation.
