Pre-K: Who Are These Small Children and Why Should I Care?

Believe it or not, all those squirmy kiddos who show up in kindergarten may have been in school before they get there. It's a strange land called preschool -- and you really ought to be writing about it. And K-12 school districts ought to be paying more attention to it.

That's what the advocates at the Bridging Gaps panel wanted to pass along today. Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation said there's an obvious gap, even in policy and government, between preschool and elementary schools. But reporters can play an important role in linking the two.

Why bother? Marci Young, project director for Pre-K Now, said that investing early can help school districts ensure that kids come to school prepared. It pays off, she said. And if school districts want any chance of closing their achievement gaps, they need to get involved before kindergarten.

"The evidence is clear that we really should not be talking about a K-12 system anymore," Young said. "We really have to move beyond that."

If you weren't convinced, Linda Sullivan-Dudzic from the Bremerton schools in Washington State served up some proof. Her school district, which she described as "a little pocket of poverty in a very affluent county," linked up with preschools to help ensure that they were preparing children for what kindergarten needs.

It wasn't happening before: Only 4 percent of children there came into kindergarten knowing their letters before the district kicked off its efforts, Sullivan-Dudzic said.

So the Bremerton schools helped provide training for preschool teachers, evaluated how well different preschools were doing in preparing children, and put together a curriculum that preschools had to use in order to get their seal of approval. And it worked: The percent of kindergartners who met Washington standards in reading went from 56 percent in 2002 to 94.4 percent in 2009. Yowza.

That's the reason that the Annie E. Casey Foundation is paying attention, said Ralph Smith, its executive vice president. It sees preschool as "a pivot point" where it can make a difference. If kids aren't reading on grade level by third grade, Smith said, they're unlikely to graduate from high school.

"You can intervene," Smith said. "But it's incredibly more difficult, incredibly more challenging and dramatically more expensive."

I posed a question about untold stories in the preschool world. Guernsey recommended digging into remediation: How many kids come to kindergarten already behind and what is your school district doing about it? Young said we should be looking at how intervening with reading problems early -- or not doing so -- can impact the number of children who are labeled with a disability.

And Sullivan-Dudzic said it's worth asking what rules are preventing school districts from making closer alliances with preschools and seeing where resources are duplicated between pre-K and school districts.

We also gabbed about the flustering complexity of preschool funding and how to navigate it. Consultant Hedy Chang offered a pointer for California reporters: Every county here has a childcare planning council that should have analyses of the need for childcare in your area. Got pointers for reporters in other states to track down your pre-K funding? Tweet it under the hashtags #ewa2010 or #ewa10.