LAUSD makes big expansion in education of its smallest students – Daily News
The Los Angeles Unified School District is pushing the gas pedal on its expansion of transitional kindergarten, and will offer the program to all four-year-olds this fall, two years ahead of the state’s mandate that school districts must do so.
The expansion seeks to better prepare all children for school and life, but especially low-income children, English language learners, and children with disabilities. Research shows that children who attend school before kindergarten are more likely to take honors classes and less likely to repeat a grade or drop out of school.
“Why wait two years to empower students with early literacy, early numeracy, earlier socialization … when we can do it now?” said LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, unveiling the plan at Van Deene Avenue Elementary STEAM Academy in the Harbor Gateway. “It’s literally an early start for students who absolutely need the normalcy, the routine and the early attention.”
State Superintendent Tony Thurmond joined Superintendent Carvalho in announcing the expansion and launching the district’s bold plan to speed things up. Thurmond touted the importance of developing early reading skills in transitional kindergarten, because students who haven’t learned to read by third grade are at high risk of dropping out and becoming involved in the criminal justice system.
“We have the ability to make sure that we educate and not incarcerate our kids,” said Thurmond. “This is a human rights issue. This is a civil rights issue.”
About 14,000 students are now enrolled in transitional kindergarten at 317 LAUSD elementary schools. In August, the district will expand that to all 488 grade schools with a goal of enrolling 10,000 to 11,000 more students.
The push for more early childhood education comes from Sacramento, where in 2021 lawmakers passed SB 130 to establish a timeline for all school districts to offer transitional kindergarten by 2026. In the 2023-24 school year transitional kindergarten must be available to children who turn five between Sept. 2 and April 2, in the 2024-25 school year it must be expanded to students who turn five by June 2, and in the 2025-26 year it must be offered to all four-year-olds.
Carvalho said that transitional kindergarten is a key part of the district’s strategy to close the academic achievement gap between low-income and vulnerable students and their more privileged peers.
“Without readiness, particularly in literacy and numeracy, for students facing poverty, for students facing English language limitations, for students dealing with housing insecurity or food insecurity, these students will naturally fall behind,” he said. “This is the right move at the right time for absolutely the right kids.”
LAUSD is able to undertake an early expansion in part thanks to grants from the state’s $2.7 billion investment in expanding transitional kindergarten across California. The district already has classroom space available and the teaching workforce is waiting in the wings, Carvalho said.
The one thing that is missing? The students.
The district’s biggest barrier to meeting its goal of enrolling 10,000 to 11,000 kids in transitional kindergarten is convincing parents to sign them up. California legally requires parents to enroll students in school by age six, but transitional kindergarten and kindergarten are optional.
“There’s still a big deal of unawareness, or reluctance to enroll students in school out of fear, or a lack of understanding of rights, legal rights and parental responsibility,” said Carvalho.
Carvalho said he had met with several immigrant parents who were afraid that enrolling their children in school could reveal their undocumented status to authorities. Other concerns he has heard include exposing young children to germs, accessing safe transportation to school, and ensuring that young children with disabilities receive proper support, he added.
The district is working to combat these beliefs through outreach programs with a focus on families whose children stand to benefit most from transitional kindergarten.
Thurmond said that the reluctance to enroll students in transitional kindergarten is a problem statewide and noted that it has historically been a challenge to enroll kids in other early education programs such as preschool and Head Start.
“We need to find a way to get a word out to communities that this is a safe and trusted opportunity for families,” he said, noting that it’s important to show parents that “they are not leaving their babies, they are providing opportunities for the future of their babies.”
At LAUSD, transitional kindergarten classrooms have no more than 24 students supported by at least one credentialed teacher and one instructional aide. More support staff is provided in classrooms with special needs students. Transitional kindergarten is a 180 day program that follows the same schedule as kindergarten and elementary school classrooms and offers free meals and transportation to all students.
Thurmond also noted that other districts are struggling to create adequate instructional space and recruit the workforce necessary to expand transitional kindergarten.
Fortunately, neither of these are a problem at LAUSD.
The district has developed a robust teacher recruitment strategy that successfully brought on 2,300 new teachers this academic year and has set up a pipeline of educators ready to cater to additional transitional kindergarten students, Carvalho said. He also attributed the district’s staffing readiness to the significant raises negotiated with United Teachers Los Angeles earlier this year.
“The most effective way of recruiting the teachers we need is that 21% three year salary increase we just negotiated,” he said. “That certainly sets a new high bar for this district.”
Classrooms are ready and waiting for students in part due to the fact that enrollment at LAUSD has been steadily declining for more than a decade. With the transitional kindergarten expansion and other enrollment outreach efforts, Carvalho is hopeful that the district may turn a corner on enrollment.
“We are ending the year on a high, enrollment has begun to stabilize,” he said. “We are actually projecting that going into next year, in part based on increased enrollment through the investments in early childhood education, we may stabilize enrollment and then the year after that it will actually begin to creep up.”