Saugus School Committee and Board of Selectmen deserve credit for sending to Town Meeting a proposal to create a study committee to examine ways to make all-day kindergarten free for town parents.
The proposal is an exciting one, in part because it invites Town Meeting members to contemplate the value of all-day kindergarten and how providing it to residents dovetails with ambitious plans by Superintendent Dr. David DeRuosi to restructure the town’s public schools.
The essence of public education is that it is available for free to parents with tax dollars paid by all of a community’s residents. Over the decades, many extracurricular activities and other aspects of public education have become fee-for-use expenses.
There are few, if any, school districts historically that have complained about receiving too much money. Almost all public educators say they do not have enough money and fees are a byproduct of attempting to bridge the free-for-all definition of public education while trying to make ends meet.
DeRuosi, with public input, has embarked on an ambitious plan to restructure Saugus schools along the lines of a two-tier elementary school structure and a combined middle school-high school. Under his plan, the two will have a “lower elementary” school building and an “upper elementary” school.
The plan’s brilliance lies in its ability to link age and education with the goal of focusing students on their potential for learning. Kindergartners and fifth graders represent vastly different age groups but current education concepts lump them into a single school.
If DeRuosi’s plan wins town approval, it will provide a compelling case for ensuring kindergarten-age town residents attend school all day. Attendance in a lower elementary school will jumpstart kindergarten education and teach the school’s youngest students to socialize with children who are two to three years older.
If it passes Town Meeting muster, the free all-day kindergarten study won’t produce findings for Town Meeting until 2018. It will be interesting to see if shifts in educational thinking over the next year at the state and national level produce a climate that is friendly to the notion of directing more tax dollars to all-day kindergarten.
If the old saying is true and ignorance is the most expensive of all human conditions, then all-day kindergarten represents a prime investment opportunity for public dollars. Students who get a solid academic foundation built beneath them at the start of their school career are students who are less likely to require remedial attention and drop-out intervention 10 years into their education.
Town Meeting is well advised to follow the selectmen and the committee and endorse the all-day kindergarten finance study.