PORT ANGELES – The Port Angeles School District is beginning to prepare for all-day kindergarten.
Officials plan meetings next month with early childhood learning specialists and kindergarten teachers.
“We are looking forward to full-day kindergarten in the fall of 2008,” said Mary Hebert, assistant superintendent.
“We are looking at how other districts do this to learn from them.”
In March, Linda Sullivan-Dudzie, of the Bremerton School District, told the Port Angeles School Board about her district’s all-day kindergarten program.
The change to all-day kindergarten increased enrollment by about 500 students per year, Sullivan-Dudzie said.
Those students’ parents were sending them out of district.
Now, they have returned – and brought some of their older siblings with them.
The Bremerton district uses a “response to intervention model” which Sullivan-Dudzie said is key to the success of the program, Sullivan-Dudzie said.
The program addresses student learning problems according to their frequency in the student population, she said.
Port Angeles plans to follow a similar model for students.
“Bremerton said that, in January, their kids were learning what the year before they were learning at the end of the year,” Hebert said.
“They had to have a discussion with the first-grade teachers to let them know that they never had kids come in like that before.”
Because kindergartners were learning more, curriculum was adjusted all the way up through elementary school.
“People often underestimate how much small children can learn given the time and opportunity,” Hebert said.
Curriculum shouldn’t be a problem, she said.
“We already have curriculum that we are not making full use of, so we expect that we can get the most out of the curriculum that we have already adopted,” Hebert said.
One important step in implementing all-day kindergarten is communicating with early learning experts in town – namely pre-schools and daycares.
“We will make curriculum available to them and let them know about early learning benchmarks, so that we are all working from the same page,” Hebert said.
“We don’t want people to get the impression that their kids have to read before they come to school or anything.
“What do we expect to do is to work as a community to have the best approach and to communicate what that is.”
