With funding, MCPS to offer all-day kindergarten option

By ROB CHANEY of the Missoulian, May 16, 2007

Missoula will get all-day kindergarten next fall after all, thanks to the Legislature's decision Tuesday to provide startup money on the last day of its special session.

That means about 540 local children will spend more time learning their ABCs, numbers and how to find the library in the city's nine elementary schools. For a year or so, it also means some schools' family resource centers or other offices may be moved to hallways or closets to make room.

The Legislature increased funding for public education by about $140 million over the next two years. That included about $36 million for schools to add all-day kindergarten to their programs. In Missoula, that brings about $2.2 million to pay for extra teachers, remodeling, classroom materials and related costs.

Missoula County Public Schools Superintendent Jim Clark said Tuesday evening all-day classrooms are needed for certain at Lowell, Franklin, Russell, Hawthorne and Lewis and Clark schools, which have the largest share of the city's low-income students. He said there is also strong support for the idea at Paxson and Rattlesnake schools.

Families of future kindergarteners at Chief Charlo and Cold Springs showed lower levels of interest in the program. Clark proposed offering a half-day program at one or the other school for those families that preferred it. There would also be full-day programs at those schools.

Clark said the opinions came from a survey of parents enrolling their children for kindergarten next year. He reported 82 percent of those responding favored the all-day option.

“I do not like all-day kindergarten,” Trustee Kelley Hirning told the board. “I'm not finding a lot of positives except for those working families.”

Trustee Nancy Pickhardt responded that Missoula teachers are reporting some children arriving in first grade with vocabularies of 1,500 to 2,000 words. They need roughly 10,000 words to effectively read and write at a first-grade level. The children who've gone through all-day kindergarten, in particular, show improvement in their word supply, she said.

Kindergarten teacher Becky Sorenson added that recent research shows it takes 18 times longer to teach a 10-year-old to read than it does a 5-year-old.

“If they don't have skills by the end of the year, they will always be behind,” Sorenson said.

Lowell kindergarten teacher Lisa Thomas objected to limiting the half-day option to a single school. Thomas runs one of the city's experimental all-day kindergarten programs already. She told of one parent who nearly pulled her child entirely from kindergarten because she didn't like the full-day schedule. Telling that parent she would have had to bus their child across town would be equally discouraging.

But that parent was happy to learn Lowell allowed families to use a half-day schedule if they wished, Thomas said. She argued that most parents who tried the system would find their children quickly grew comfortable with it.

Sorenson said a majority of the district's kindergarten teachers agreed a self-contained half-day program was a better system. Allowing every class to let some kids leave would cause confusion and make it hard to keep all the children on an even pace. It would also make it impossible to get the most efficient staffing level, because the number of kids per class would be constantly changing.

“We should have the (half-day) option, but it has to be done in a fiscally responsible manner,” Trustee Tom Orr said. “They'll have a choice. They can go to that program or they can go to another educational setting.”

However, kindergarten is still not a required part of public school. MCPS Assistant Superintendent Gail Becker said it's possible that a parent could decide to send a child to kindergarten for half the day, without needing a policy in place to allow it.

The final motion was to start all-day kindergarten districtwide next fall, and include some kind of half-day option. But the trustees agreed to wait on the details of half-day classes until there is more solid information on how many families might want it.

Trustees Orr, Pickhardt, Toni Rehbein and Jenda Hemphill approved the decision, with Hirning opposed. Trustees Scott Bixler and Joe Toth were absent. High school trustees Drake Lemm, Rick Johns, Debbie Dupree and Jim Sadler did not have a vote on the matter.