Kindergarten program has impressive results; officials want funding

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

Kindergarten teacher Marilyn Ellison helps Tyler Holiday with his work during classes on Wednesday at Chee Dodge Elementary School, north of Gallup. Ellison has been participating in a pilot program, Kindergarten Plus, which runs from July through June and helps students learn to read and write before entering first grade. [Photo by Jeff Jones/independent]

GALLUP — It's called Kindergarten Plus and it has gotten the attention of local public school officials in a big way.

Some are indicating that it just may be a way for the Gallup-McKinley County Public School District to turn around years of bad test scores and provide students who heretofore have been problem learners a chance to excel early on.

The program has some supporters within the Central Office staff as well as the school board. And if it is going to survive, it also must get some support from state legislators.

Ed Monaghan, assistant superintendent for research for the district, said some children in the program have shown the ability to excel in areas that indicate the program may actually give students a boost in the learning curve.

Kindergarten Plus is now in its third and last year of a pilot program at four area schools Chee Dodge, Lincoln, Thoreau and Thoatchi elementary schools.

It's approach is simple. Kindergarten students in the program attend school an extra 40 days, 20 days before the start of regular school and 20 days after the end.

Tammy Hall, director of Early Childhood Education for the district, said this allows the student a chance to "catch up" to the other students in the class in the areas of reading and language.

This is especially true of students who are in the English as a second language category.

School officials said that in many cases, students who have been raised speaking Navajo, for example, have a hard time catching up with students who have been brought up with the English language because much of the instruction and all of the testing is done in the English language.

It sometimes take years before these students can start reading, writing and comprehending the English language on the same level as their English speaking peers and many find themselves never able to catch up fully.

But students in the Kindergarten Plus program are showing signs that they are being able to excel in reading and language far better than many of their peers who aren't in the program.

Marilyn Ellison, a kindergarten teacher at Chee Dodge, said she has been noticing the difference in the kindergarten students who are taking the program.

For example, usually it takes most of the class until the middle of April to reach a certain level in language comprehension, but she has found that students in the Kindergarten Plus program have been hitting this level by December.

Danny Smith, the principal at Chee Dodge, said he has been noticing immediate improvements as well, especially among those students who have come into the school at the age of five with a reading and language comprehension level of two years and five months.

By the end of kindergarten, students in the Kindergarten Plus program in this category have been brought up to the five or five and a half year level in just nine months.

There have also been cases, he said, where students in the program have been tested at a first grade or better reading level by January of their kindergarten year.

Everyone who has seen the early results has been very pleased with the results and say that the program should be continued.

All the district has so far is early indicators. The first students in the program won't reach the third grade until next year and that's the year that students are really tested for the first time for things like the Average Yearly Progress by the state.

But Monaghan and others say that if the progress is there as expected, students who have been in the Kindergarten Plus program should do well in tests by the third grade.

And if it is successful, educators say that the state and the district should put as much money into the program as possible.

Otherwise, many of these students by the third grade would be found to be far behind their peers and the district would have to spend a great deal of money in programs to help them catch up.

So, said Monaghan, it's a question of whether you put the money into a program in the kindergarten year that shows it can make a difference or start putting it in the third grade when students start showing they need help to catch up with their peers.

The program isn't that expensive.

School Superintendent Karen White said the district received a $100,000 grant from the state to implement it for three years. The district had to throw in another $40,000 to pay for the extra bus runs.

Only four districts in the state were chosen to be part of this pilot program and all have indicated that they have seen a lot of positive results; so, White said there will be a movement in the next session of the legislature to get the state to continue funding the program.