“My kids who are struggling are doing better,” said Mary Plouffe, who began teaching 15 years ago. During previous school years, she said, she was only able to get to science or social studies on any given day, not both. “The best thing has been being able to teach every subject every day,” said Wendy Lundquist, who has taught kindergarten for 19 years. Credit: Lillian Mongeau/The Hechinger Report The social benefits of eating lunch at school have been a huge unexpected benefit of full-day kindergarten said principal, Kelley Paradis. Paradis, whose school offered full-day kindergarten for the first time in the 2017-18 school year, said that by April 2018, every class for the 2018-19 school year was full and the school already had a waiting list.Īvery Geddes, 6, is served a fruit snack for dessert during lunch at Main Dunstable Elementary School in Nashua, New Hampshire. “It feels good to be able to offer parents what they’ve been asking for for years,” said Kelley Paradis, principal of Main Dunstable Elementary School in Nashua. In Nashua, full-day kindergarten has long been provided in schools that serve a majority low-income population, but 2017-18 is the first school year full-day has been available at all 12 district elementary schools. However, districts here are not required to offer kindergarten at all, nor are children mandated to attend it. The new funding doesn’t kick in until 2019, but many New Hampshire school leaders aren’t waiting until then to offer full-day programs. New Hampshire is the latest state to approve legislation to fund full-day kindergarten in districts that want it. Related: Why is it so hard to stop suspending kindergartners? In the 36 states that don’t require schools to offer full-day kindergarten, many districts have gone ahead with it anyway, using a combination of federal funding, available state dollars and parent-paid tuition to cover the cost of the approximately 540 extra hours of instruction time each school year. Full-day kindergarten, which has been shown to boost academic gains for students well into elementary school, could be critical. Spending on state-funded preschool programs for 4-year-olds has risen in both red and blue states, especially since 2008.īut for the benefits of preschool to be sustained, experts argue, children must continue to receive a high-quality early elementary education. Former President Barack Obama made preschool a key part of his education agenda during his eight years in office. Of those, two offer a waiver to children who are assessed as ready to start first grade.Įarly learning advocates and politicians have spent a lot of time in the past five years talking about preschool. And even though most states require school districts to offer at least half-day kindergarten, only 17 states and the District of Columbia mandate that children attend it. Only 14 states and Washington, D.C., require districts to offer full-day kindergarten, according to kindergarten policy data collected by the Education Commission of the States, a national think tank. But state policy has been slow to catch up with this point. It’s also a fact - true, true, true, and we can prove it - that full-day kindergarten classes like Lemoine’s help kids do better in early elementary school, researchers say.
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