Dear Parents of Incoming Kindergarten Students,

At this Thursday's meeting, the Board of Trustees will discuss a proposal to extend the kindergarten instructional day beginning in the 2018-19 school year. Should the Board support this proposal, the change would affect the school day for your incoming kindergarten student. I am sharing this information with you so that you have an opportunity to provide input on the discussion.

To provide input, you can:
  • reply to this email; I will then copy the Board on my acknowledgement to you so that they see your comments.
  • come to the board meeting this Thursday evening and fill out a speaker's card; you will have up to 3 minutes at the podium to share your thinking with the Board. The meeting starts at 6:15pm, and I expect to start discussing the extended kindergarten day agenda item around 6:35pm.

Should we decide to move forward with a longer kindergarten instructional day, I would expect to work proactively with our administrators and teachers on how best to implement a longer day, the specific logistics, etc. We would then share that information with you as it's solidified.

Background
The extended kindergarten day memo to the Board of Trustees and its supporting documentation is below.


DATE:           March 29, 2018
TO:                 Board of Trustees
SUBJECT:      Kindergarten Instructional Day
 
 
DISCUSSION ITEM
Staff asks for the Board’s guidance regarding extending the kindergarten instructional day at our elementary schools.
 
BACKGROUND
Since the advent of transitional kindergarten in 2012, our kindergarten students are now three months older than they were before that year (required to turn 5 years old by September 1 rather than December 2). In addition to being older, our kindergarten students are expected to learn more than before. In 2010, California adopted the Common Core Standards in math and English, which increased the rigor of our state’s academic standards. Our older kindergarten students are capable of learning more in a longer instructional day, and the state expects our kindergarten students to learn more than it has in the past.    

According to the non-profit, non-partisan research organization Child Trends, the number of children attending full-day kindergarten in the US has been steadily increasing. In 1977, 27.5% of US children attended full-day kindergarten. By 2013, 77.1% of US children attended full-day kindergarten.[1] Locally, Belmont-Redwood Shores has a relatively short instructional day in kindergarten at four hours. San Carlos School District’s instructional day in kindergarten is five hours, and Burlingame School District’s instructional day in kindergarten is five and a half hours. Last year, the Palo Alto Unified School District extended their kindergarten day (to six hours, 10 minutes) with positive results.[2] When surveyed, 97% of parents were satisfied with full-day kindergarten in Palo Alto. We propose to extend our instructional day to six hours, equivalent with our first grade instructional day.  

Research suggests that a longer kindergarten day is beneficial for all students. Attached is a New America article from 2014 describing a University of Virginia study[3] that was able to use randomized assignment to full-day and part-day kindergarten. Full-day kindergarten provided strong literacy benefits for all students on average. Another attached article features an Ontario schools study from the University of Toronto, which found that full-day kindergarten provided significant benefits in literacy and self-regulation.[4] While we will not be able to staff our full-day kindergarten program like Palo Alto or Ontario, a longer instructional day in Belmont-Redwood Shores will give our kindergarten teachers more time to provide a well-rounded experience for our students—time for free choice, exploration, and play. We are confident that our students will experience academic, social-emotional, and self-regulation benefits from a longer kindergarten day.    

Additionally, we propose to give principals and school sites the flexibility to stagger as needed their kindergarten instructional day vis-à-vis the other grade levels (up to 15 minutes) to avoid excessive traffic issues, while being sure to provide the kindergarten teachers with their required planning and lesson preparation time.

We do not propose to change the four-hour transitional kindergarten instructional day at this time. We have checked Education Code and consulted staff at the California Department of Education. Education Code 37202 (b) would allow our school district to provide different lengths of the school day for transitional kindergarten and kindergarten. 

We have been advised by legal counsel that our collective bargaining agreement allows for this shift, and we have given formal notice to the Belmont-Redwood Shores Faculty Association of this proposal and the Board’s discussion of it. 
 
Last, we expect the cost of this extension of the kindergarten instructional day to be modest, considering that we are getting an extra two hours of schooling in each of 130 school days for 450 kindergarteners. If we hired 3 lunch supervisors to monitor a separate kindergarten lunch for 1 hour per school, it would cost an additional $58,000 for the entire District for the year, which we consider to be an upper limit. Also, we would expect a reduction in $5,000 in afterschool childcare costs for Tinsley kindergarten students. Last, we would expect a one-time additional cost for summer planning for kindergarten teachers to plan for a longer instructional day in the fall. If we gave each of our 18 kindergarten teachers 20 hours of additional planning time to use as they see fit, that would be 360 hours x $30 = $10,800. 


Attachments:
  1. Child Trends DataBank, Full-day Kindergarten: Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being, February 2015.
  2. CJ Libassi for New America, “Best Research Yet on the Effects of Full-Day Kindergarten,” December 2014.
  3. Marva Hinton for EdWeek, “Full-Day Kindergarten Students Do Better Than Half-Day Students, Analysis Finds,” August 2017. 
  4. Clarisse Haxton for PAUSD, Full-Day Kindergarten Implementation Evaluation Study, 2017.
  5. National Education Association, Full-Day Kindergarten: An Advocacy Guide, Section 1 only, 2006.


Footnotes
  1. Child Trends DataBank, Full-day Kindergarten: Indicators of Child and Youth Well-Being, February 2015. See attached.
  2. See Clarisse Haxton for PAUSD, Full-Day Kindergarten Implementation Evaluation Study, 2017, attached. Also, note that Palo Alto starts the first six weeks of the year with a four-hour instructional day for kindergarten, and then shifts to the six-hour instructional day in early October.
  3. The Gibbs paper from the University of Virginia is not attached because it’s 47 pages long. It can be found here. The study examined the progress of students randomly assigned to part-day and full-day kindergarten across five school districts, with over 600 students assigned to full-day kindergarten and over 400 students assigned to part-day kindergarten. The study reported an average full-day kindergarten benefit of .31 standard deviations in literacy skills as measured at the end of the school year.   
  4. It is important to note that the Ontario schools structured and staffed their full-day kindergarten program differently (a 2-year kindergarten program staffed with an additional early learning specialist), so the same effects should not be expected in Belmont-Redwood Shores.  


Thank you for your interest. Don't hesitate to reply to this email with any questions. However, currently I do not have any specifics regarding exact start and end times. Our staff is seeking conceptual direction from the Board at this time.

Sincerely,

Michael Milliken, Ph.D.
Superintendent