Last Thursday, New York State Assemblymember Michaelle C. Solages and New York State Senator Monica R. Martinez jointly announced a budget victory: $475K for Long Island's first Pre-K Regional Technical Assistance Center (RTAC). 

"We are extremely excited and grateful that our Long Island legislators, thought leaders and stakeholders were able to work together to get this funding," says Lucinda Hurley of The Long Island Pre-K Initiative. "The RTAC will support the expansion of Pre-K on Long Island, provide professional development to ensure quality programs, build partnerships between school districts and community-based organizations, and provide technical expertise for leaders."

In her press release announcing the funding, Assemblymember Solages noted that the foundation for the RTAC has been established by The Long Island Pre-K Initiative, which "was established through private funding that is now exhausted, creating an even more dire need for the RTAC pilot to be funded in 2019. Long Island's RTAC will bolster New York's existing investment in Pre-K and ensure successful expansion and efficient use of any new funding for universal Pre-K for all Long Island children."

The transition to Kindergarten offers a unique opportunity for schools to establish attendance habits that promote success in schools. So says Attendance Works, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing chronic absences and reducing equity gaps. To help in this effort, they offer a toolkit that includes outlines for community outreach and attendance campaigns. But it all starts with integrating attendance into all Kindergarten transition activities. For example, they suggest that schools: 

Click here for the complete toolkit and downloadable handouts.

This is the question asked by Stanford University professor Deborah Stipek in a recent opinion piece for Education Week. She's concerned about the "obsession" with Kindergarten readiness--especially since, in her view, "what constitutes 'ready' is arbitrary to the point of being meaningless. The word ready suggests a dichotomous variable--children are either ready or they are not." For one thing, she points out, children may be advanced in some ways but not in others. For another, whether a child is "ready" depends on the kind of school they will be entering.

"Clearly the concept of readiness needs to have built into it an interaction between children's skills and dispositions on the one hand and the experiences they encounter when they enter school on the other." Stipek suggests that as much attention should be given to schools' readiness for children: "...we need to make sure that schools are ready to address children's learning needs, whatever their skills when they walk in the door."  

Full-Time Teacher Assistant

Part-Time Teacher Assistant

Variety Child Learning Center, Levittown and Syosset

Email resume to JHenderson@vclc.org

• Your name
• Your position
• Your e-mail and phone number

• The name of your school and the town it's located in. You can include your web address, if you have one.
• A very brief description of the position or positions you want to fill. (For example: "Part-time Teacher Assistant" or "Full-time Pre-K Teacher."
• Information about how potential applicants should contact your for details or to apply. (For example: "Call Jane Smith at 631-xxx-xxxx" or "Send e-mail to jane.smith@schoolname.org")