This past week, Voices for Utah Children released a report called, “Three Things Utah Can Do to Ensure Right-Sized Access to Full-Day Kindergarten.” According to their research, many school districts and charter schools want to offer more full-day kindergarten options for families, many families want to send their children to full-day kindergarten and many studies show that those extra hours of instruction can really help kids academically – especially those kids who are below proficiency when they start kindergarten.
Yet, Utah still lags behind the nation in terms of how many kindergarteners are able to attend kindergarten for the length of a normal school day. As of 2017, the national average for full-day kindergarten attendance was 79%. In Utah, that figure was only about 20%.
It’s time to change that statistic. An important step in that direction will be passing HB99, “Kindergarten Enhancement Amendments,” sponsored by state Rep. Lowry Snow of St. George.
Back in 2007, when I was on the board of the United Way, I worked with a team of advocates to support state Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, in passing a bill that created an Optional Extended-Day Kindergarten program, funded by state dollars. Thanks to that bill’s passage and implementation, thousands of Utah kindergarteners have been able to get extra instruction, to help catch them up to their peers.
But for 10 years, funding for that program stayed flat. The $7.5 million we worked so hard to secure for optional extended-day kindergarten, for the little kids who are most at risk for academic failure, slowly but surely diminished in purchasing power. Each year, as education costs and inflation rose, a smaller percentage of Utah kindergarteners were served through this program.
In 2017, the new Kindergarten Supplemental Enrichment Program (KSEP) added another $3 million to the state’s support for struggling kindergarteners. This program was funded by federal Temporary Aid for Needy Families (TANF) dollars that expire at the end of the current school year. Then we will be back to just $7.5 million invested in this critical early education opportunity for students who are at risk for academic failure.
HB99 would replace the KSEP funding that is about to expire. On top of that, it would add nearly $16 million in new money toward the OEK program. The bill would combine the two programs and bring our state’s total investment in optional extended-day kindergarten up to $26.1 million. That’s enough funding to cover a full school day of quality instruction for nearly one-third of all Utah’s kindergarten students.
More funding for OEK is supported by the Governor’s Commission on Education Excellence, the Utah PTA and the Utah State Board of Education. The impact of this early education investment has been documented not only in national research, but in the data collected by our own Utah school districts.
HB99 would provide enough funding to ensure that all the Utah kindergartners who are most at-risk for academic failure would have access to the extra hours of instruction they need to be successful in first grade.
Utah legislators, families in your districts are ready for more kindergarten options. Whether your own family prefers half-day, full-day or no formal kindergarten at all, I hope you will support HB99, in support of those Utah kids who need a little extra help as they embark on their public school careers.
Mike Zody
Mike Zody is an attorney with Parsons Behle & Latimer in Salt Lake City. He is a member of Voices for Utah Children’s board of directors and a former board member of the United Way of Salt Lake.
