Trustees right to wait for more data

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/02/2012 (5317 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Parents who may have hoped that the Brandon School Division would have expanded all-day, every-day kindergarten to other division schools had those hopes dashed on Tuesday night when board trustees reluctantly voted to reject the request.

Last year, the division embarked on the one-year pilot program in four schools for the 2011-12 school year. The all-day every-day kindergarten project mixes elements from the division’s Kinderlinks, Get Ready, Get Set, Go … To Kindergarten and Learning Partnership programs to develop basic literacy and numeracy skills through play-based learning.

The concept isn’t new to Manitoba or early childhood educators, but it’s a new approach within the BSD.

At the outset, Supt. Donna Michaels said the project would be reviewed, using parent and teacher input, throughout the year. During the Brandon Sun editorial coffee meeting on Wednesday morning, Michaels said anecdotal evidence from teachers suggests the program is having a positive effect.

Their hope was to expand the all-day every-day kindergarten program to George Fitton, King George, O’Kelly, and Valleyview for the 2012-13 school year.

However, as BSD board of trustees chairman Mark Sefton said on Tuesday evening, the trustees decided that until there was hard, empirical data to back up the claim that all-day, every-day kindergarten classes would be beneficial to students down the road, they couldn’t justify spending $349,800 on 7.5 new staff positions to expand the program.

“That was a really tough decision,” Sefton told the Sun. “A lot of trustees really stewed over that, because I think people … see the benefit of all-day, every-day kindergarten, but we don’t have the hard numbers, the hard statistics to show that. We feel it in our guts, we feel it in our bones, but we don’t have the hard data to support that.”

While the program wasn’t expanded, the trustees did, however, approve $176,000 to continue with the pilot program for a second year at the same four schools: Betty Gibson, New Era, Riverheights and Riverview.

With all the other financial needs facing the school division, including a provincially mandated requirement to limit classroom student numbers in kindergarten to Grade 3 across Manitoba, the pilot project can’t move forward without some help from the provincial government.

As we reported last year, the province has sought public feedback on whether it should move toward a mandatory full-day, every-day kindergarten system for the entire province, as part of the NDP government’s Conversation on Education campaign.

Manitoba Education Minister Nancy Allan estimated it could cost about $80 million to implement such a program province wide.

On this page last June, we cited the results of a pilot study in southwestern Ontario that indicated full-day kindergarten may be having a negative effect on the learning and personal development of some children. At the same time, the B.C. Ministry of Education website maintains that “full-day learning” increases post-secondary graduation rates, and helps children better transition into Grade 1.

Yet the pilot program is no doubt a boon for parents of young children who stand to benefit from spending less on daycare costs — whether their son’s or daughter’s learning abilities improve or not.

In our view, the school division board has done the right thing by waiting for more and better data, rather than blindly moving forward with all-day, every-day kindergarten.

If the trustees and educators can prove that a child’s learning ability improves under the BSD pilot program, it will give the board a much firmer foundation upon which to mount a campaign for provincial funds — and therefore have a much greater chance of success.