Push for all-day kindergarten
Arrive at school. Take off your mittens, hat, jacket, boots and snow pants and put them away.
Listen to the teacher read a story. Practice your phonics. Learn how to hold your pencil. Learn to write a story with the rest of your group. Tell the teacher what you did at your Grandma's house over the weekend. Visit the potty. Work on sorting shaped objects and grouping them by kind. Maybe be pulled aside for a little one-on-one speech therapy. Experiment with planting a bean seed in a paper cup of dirt. Look out the window at the duck hatching a nest up against a school wall.
On with the snow pants, the boots, the jacket, the hat and mittens. Line up to go home.
A jam-packed 2.5 hours a day of time to build a base for students' lifelong academic success is one reason a 19-member committee of district administrators, school principals and kindergarten teachers recommended Monday night that the Geneva public schools convert to all-day kindergarten.
Kindergartners have to meet just as many of the Illinois Early Learning Standards as first-graders. But they are expected to do so in half the time in Geneva.
And kindergarten is the time to catch any problems, according to Jane Gazdziak, the district's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
"If they (a student) are even half a year behind in first or second grade, they will forever be behind," she said, saying there are correlations between kindergarten performance and high school performance.
With full-day kindergarten, time for reading and mathematics instruction, which the district considers of the utmost importance, would be doubled. Students would get six times more time for science and social studies (up from a half-hour a week) and twice as much time for music and physical education.
The committee, working since September 2006, has studied other districts throughout the Chicago area. It found that in most districts offering a full-day option, even parents who initially opposed full-day tended to enroll their children in it within a few weeks of the start of school.
First-grade teachers say that with more rigorous work being done in first grade, having students who are used to attending a full day is important. One teacher estimated it takes first-graders six to eight weeks to get used to going to school a full day.
Cost is an issue, however. The committee estimated that it would cost the district an additional $840,000 for teachers and assistants, and $144,000 for classroom equipment, to add full-day. That does not include the construction costs of modifying two classrooms per school, or an estimated $276,000 per room if they were to enlarge buildings.
The committee then recommended an interim plan: Offering something called "Foundations," for students deemed to be at risk academically. Those children would attend school an extra half-day four days a week, in a class of no more than 10 students (normal kindergartens have 20-plus). This would be set up in two schools, with students from the others bused over.
Board member Autumn Burns said she supported adding full-day kindergarten to the district's long-range goals.
"I've always been surprised this district did not have full-day kindergarten," she said.
The board took no action on the recommendation Monday night. The committee is expected to present again to the board in a few weeks with more details, as well as ways for district residents to give their opinions.