Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
School officials visit full-day classes
WEST CHESTER » School superintendents from parts of Chester and Delaware counties along with representatives from the Chester and Delaware County Intermediate Units recently paid a visit to the West Chester Area School District to observe the district’s full-day kindergarten program. The program, which is in its first year of implementation, offers a hands-on curriculum that allows children time to play – in both directed and nondirected ways – as a critical part of their school day. District administration closely consulted with child development expert and author Dr. Kathy HirshPasek (author of Einstein Never Used Flashcards), to design the program based on the knowledge that play is a central component of children’s growth.
Some of the districts represented at the meeting currently offer half-day kindergarten programs, and they were in interested in learning more about WCASD’s fullday program.
Several teachers shared their feelings about the program, including Mary C. Howse Elementary kindergarten teacher Kathy Baer, the district’s longest-tenured kindergarten teacher.
“This program is phenomenal,” said Baer. “Thirty years ago, I did play in my classroom, but the play we are doing now is so different. We all have occupations. I’m a teacher; you’re a superintendent – our job is to help children. A child’s occupation is to play and learn. And, it’s definitely through their play that they learn more about the real world.”
WCASD had tried several times in the past to move from half-day to full-day kindergarten. After experiencing about five years in a row of declining enrollment, the school board approved the switch in the spring of 2016. Administrators and teachers then took a year to develop the curriculum.
Superintendent Jim Scanlon met Dr. Hirsh-Pasek years ago and was struck by her research that showed students who started in a play-based curriculum outperformed those who were in a more traditional program on standardized tests like the SATs and ACTs. Scanlon said HirshPasek had incorporated her ideas in various private school settings, but not public schools. While fullday kindergarten is not a new idea, Scanlon wanted to try something different, and he felt HirshPasek’s ideas were the way to go.
“We said to the board, we think we can do this,” Scanlon told his counterparts. “The day after the board approved full-day kindergarten, we called Kathy and said ‘We’re going to take a year to develop this program. Will you help us build a play-based curriculum?’”
From a financial perspective, the move made sense as well.
“We needed roughly $1.7 million to launch full-day kindergarten. We were sending about 300 kids a year to charter schools and paying for it,” continued Scanlon. “We did a whole analysis and estimated that we would bring back between 37-40 kids from charter schools. When we began the 2017-18 school year, we had 85 kids return, giving us $1.1 million, roughly two-thirds of what we needed for the program. In es-
sence, we were already paying for full-day kindergarten; we just weren’t offering it.”
Many students returned from charter schools, Scanlon said. Not just kindergarten, but from grades 1-3 as well. Quite often, families with multiple children would wind up staying in charter schools until they were in first grade or higher to keep their kids in one school.
“We would end up paying charter school tuition for three or four years, and then the kids would come back to us in third grade, and there were learning gaps primarily in reading. We would then spend a lot of money to provide additional supports for those students,” said Scanlon. “We thought that if we got them starting in kindergarten, they would be able to read sooner rather than later, and that is some of the data that we are tracking.”
For district administrators, moving to a full-day program was not about adding more academic content to the curriculum.
“We didn’t want our kindergarten program to become the new first grade. We had plenty to teach in terms of our Pennsylvania Core Standards,” said Director of Elementary Education Dr. Tammi Florio. “We teach them; the content is there. We just needed more time. Dr. Scanlon would often talk about the fact that kindergarten was the only place in the system that we could add time for our children. We wanted them earlier. We wanted to be able to teach more deeply, to enrich, to remediate. We wanted to be able to meet all of those needs and personalize their education.”
Baer noted that the biggest change she has noticed because of the full-day program is a greater sense of community in her classroom.
“The children really get to know each other. They feel comfortable in their learning environment, and the more comfortable they are, the more confident they become. They are not afraid to try. They are learning to persevere and really work through their problems because we have the time. In the half-day program, we didn’t have that. We didn’t really have the time to focus on their physical, social, and emotional well-being. I think play is helping these children to become happier, healthier citizens.”
Dr. Hirsh-Pasek will visit kindergarten classrooms in the district on April 18 to see the program in action and then she will talk about her work during a special parent presentation at Peirce Middle School. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are available through www.eventbrite.com/e/ dr-kathy-hirsh-pasek-tickets-43726489106.
Kindergarten registration for the 2018-19 school year in the West Chester Area School District is now open. More information can be found at www.wcasd.net/ Page/9516.