Mandatory kindergarten expedited

Lawmakers are fast-tracking legislation that would make kindergarten mandatory for 5-year-olds in hopes of giving the state time to run a public education campaign about the change before the school year ends next month.

Under Senate Bill 2768, beginning with the 2014-2015 school year, kindergarten attendance would be mandatory for children who are 5 years old on or before July 31 preceding the school year. Hawaii’s compulsory education age currently starts at 6.

The bill passed out of a joint House-Senate conference committee Tuesday afternoon. It next heads to floor votes for final approval before being sent to the governor.

The end of the school year "is literally a month away, so while we’re still splitting hairs on (other) bills, we want to be able to get (this bill) to the governor, have him sign it and have the Department of Education start to get the information out to the families and through the schools as soon as possible," said Sen. Jill Tokuda (D, Kailua-Kaneohe), chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

Department of Education spokes­woman Dona­lyn Dela Cruz agreed that getting information out before the end of this school year would help with the transition.

"Should this measure move forward, it is important for us to get word out of kindergarten changes to impacted families as quickly as possible," she said.

The change is largely seen as symbolic — 97 percent of Hawaii’s 5-year-olds already voluntarily attend kindergarten. But with the state’s push for publicly funded preschool, the move was seen as a way to strengthen Hawaii’s early-education system.

"The majority of children do attend kindergarten. We want to make sure that all children start off with that high-quality kindergarten experience," said Tokuda, who introduced the bill with 19 of her colleagues signing on as co-sponsors. "This is really aiming to make sure that all children get that exposure and experience early on."

She added that mandating kindergarten now is timely given the state’s implementation of the Common Core State Standards, a set of rigorous academic standards adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

"There’s so much more at stake," she said.

Sixteen other states require kindergarten attendance, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

The bill had broad support from the local education community, including the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s College of Education, Hawaii State Teachers Association, Hawaii Association for the Education of Young Children, Hawaii P-20 Partnerships for Education, Good Beginnings Alliance and the Hui for Excellence in Education.

"As we work to implement an early learning system in Hawaii, it makes sense to have mandatory kindergarten to promote the continuity of children’s experiences from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten," GG Wei­sen­feld, director of the Executive Office on Early Learning, said in written testimony. "While most children enroll in kindergarten, some families do not feel compelled to send their children to school on a consistent basis because it is not mandatory. Without the skills that can be gained through a kindergarten experience, these children may have to play catch up with their peers in the first grade."

The League of Women Voters Hawaii opposed the bill, saying in written testimony that the state lacks fully qualified early-childhood education teachers for this age group.

Earlier versions of the bill would also have required the state Department of Education and Executive Office on Early Learning to develop a more individualized kindergarten-readiness assessment system to measure child development across multiple areas, including literacy, mathematics and cognitive, physical and social-emotional development.

But the assessment requirement is not in the final version of the bill due to funding restraints.

An earlier version of the bill sought $870,000 for the administration, training, technology and support necessary for a new assessment system, including four full-time positions for professional development and training of kindergarten teachers.

"It was taken out as a result of some of the difficult financial decisions that had to be made," said Tokuda, who also sits on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, which is negotiating a final state budget bill with the House Finance Committee.

"Otherwise it would result in basically an unfunded mandate," she said.

Past attempts to mandate kindergarten were met with staunch opposition from parental rights activists.

"For parents who want to home-school their children, they still have all of those particular exemptions in place. Nothing precludes them from continuing to home-school their child; that’s still very much in law," Tokuda said.

The bill also was worded so as not to prevent private schools from setting their own entry dates for kindergarten students. The July 31 age cutoff would apply only to public kindergarten programs, Tokuda said.