Data draws concerns for kindergartners

WAITSBURG—Waitsburg Kindergarten teacher Pam Beasley presented the WaKIDS program and an update on resulting data to the Waitsburg School Board at their March meeting. Beasley said resulting data shows deficiencies in several areas.

WaKIDS (Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills) was piloted in the 2010-11 school and became mandatory in state-funded full-day kindergarten programs in 2012-13.

The program assesses students in six areas of development and learning: social-emotional, physical, language, cognitive development, literacy and math. WaKIDS esearch shows that when students enter school with the skills expected of a kindergartner, they are substantially more likely to meet math and ELA standards at third grade level.

Beasley said the program includes three components: a family connection, an early learning connection with preschools, and a whole-child assessment. Beasley said the program, while time-consuming, forces her to know her students well as each child is assessed on 31 different objectives. She noted that it is a benefit that she has been the sole instructor assessing and recording data for the last seven years.

Beasley said that collected data shows that Waitsburg students are entering kindergarten with low scores in social/emotional skills. She said that, of the last five classes, one class had only 40% of students meet the social/emotional objective, another had 54%, one had 55% and two had 75% of students meet the objective.

“That has been one area that has been really, really low of kids entering,” Beasley said.

She said that scores on alphabet and counting have also been very low.

Beasley said the data “blew our theories out of the water” in regard to preschool attendance.

“You would assume that kids going to preschool would have higher scores. And that’s not necessarily true because it depends on what preschools the kids went to,” Beasley said.

She said that students who attended play-based preschools did not show an advantage and said that it is important that play be balanced with academics.

Beasley said she has ideas on programming to increase future scores and that she is excited to be working with preschool teacher Marcie Martinez.

“We have things we are doing to try and close the gap for the kids who come unprepared because there is a lot of research that kids who enter behind in kindergarten don’t catch up. That worries us a lot. We lose sleep over it,” she said.