By BRIDGET TURCOTTE
SAUGUS — The All Day Kindergarten Task Force is making strides to provide a richer educational experience to all kindergarten students, regardless of their family’s ability to pay.
“It’s always better to have quality teachers for a full day than quality teachers half day,” said Superintendent Dr. David DeRuosi.
The task force formed in November at the request of school committee member Peter Manoogian. The group includes an elementary school principal, two kindergarten teachers, a town meeting member, a few parents, Manoogian and DeRuosi.
Tuition for all-day kindergarten is $2,700. There is no tuition for half-day kindergarten. Each year, 10 full-day scholarships are awarded based on financial need.
“What was apparent to me — the compelling reason (half day students) weren’t enrolled (in full day kindergarten) is the $2,700 (cost),” Manoogian said. “Poverty should not hold back the ability of a child to achieve. There is new growth in this town and I believe that it is wrong that we’re leaving kids behind. I think the whole community needs to have this feeling.”
Working together as a group, they took questions from the school committee about how a free all-day kindergarten program would work. They researched, met with other school departments who have implemented a program, and Thursday, provided answers to everything from a prediction of how many kids would be enrolled, to where possible funding could come from, DeRuosi said.
Children in the full-day program spend 60 minutes on math, 60 on social studies and 60 on English language arts each day, he said. Alternatively, students in the half-day program spend about 30 minutes on each.
“Kindergarten isn’t what it used to be back when I was in kindergarten,” DeRuosi said. “These kids are really in there working now — they’re ready to read when they come out of kindergarten.”
“I think it’s beneficial — I don’t think anybody could argue the fact that all-day kindergarten is very beneficial,” said Jeannie Meredith, chairwoman of the school committee. “I had one child that went half days and one child that went full days. The difference was, my daughter who went full days could read by the end of kindergarten. My other daughter had to be tutored because I wanted her to be able to read before the first grade.”
While all parties involved can see the value, Meredith said there’s a question of whether the timing is off. As part of a complete overhaul of Saugus Public Schools, by 2020, the number of school buildings could be condensed to just three. A lower elementary school would serve Pre-K through grade 2 students; an upper elementary would serve grades 3-5; and, through the project closest to fruition, the middle and high school would share a single building.
The new school structure would replace the existing Pre-K, four elementary schools, middle and high school. Fewer schools would mean less operating costs and more money in the school budget, Meredith said.
DeRuosi proposed funding options including creating a stabilization account earmarked only for the use of providing kindergarten; looking for grants; exploring the town’s new economic growth; using Chapter 70 funds; or finding a way to fit it into the school budget.
“The task force, in my opinion, was a good opportunity to begin to flush out some of the options that are out there,” DeRuosi said. “For everything we looked at, we came up with a few more questions. The overall goal is to begin to look at (whether) we can fund it and how we can sustain it. That’s the biggest thing. You can build a program and fund it for a year or two, but you have to look at long-term capacity.”
The school committee voted to ask town meeting to support the efforts by forming an additional group to research funding options at the next annual town meeting.
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Bridget Turcotte can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her at Twitter @BridgetTurcotte.