Expanded pre-K will help Portland meet goals
By Xavier Botana
The new school year has begun and so has our
expanded pre-kindergarten program. We’ve added two new pre-K classrooms
this year and will continue to add more each year over the next five years in
an effort to eventually offer pre-K to all Portland 4-year-olds who need it.
The pre-K expansion is just one of four new
initiatives in the 2019-2020 budget embodying the goals of our Portland
Promise, the Portland Public Schools’ strategic plan. Starting this month, I’m
dedicating my columns to how each initiative will help us realize the four
foundational goals in that plan: Equity, Whole Student, Achievement and
People.
My focus this month is our pre-K program
expansion, which will help us realize our Equity goal. That goal pledges us to
support each student’s particular path to achieving high standards and rooting
out systemic or ongoing inequities.
As Maine’s largest and most diverse school
system, Equity is essential to us. Unfortunately, however, our data shows that while
our financially advantaged students compete on par with students from
surrounding school districts, our financially disadvantaged students don’t have
the same positive outcomes. We also have gaps in achievement for students of
color and those learning to speak English.
We’re expanding pre-K because decades of
research show that quality pre-K can help reduce such gaps.
According to the “The Current State of Scientific Knowledge on Pre-Kindergarten Effects," a comprehensive
2017 report completed by a task force of interdisciplinary scientists, all
students benefit from pre-K but economically disadvantaged children and dual
language learners show the greatest gains in learning.
In short, pre-K is an investment in our
students, particularly at-risk students, to realize our Equity and Achievement
goals.
In March, the Board voted to add nine new
classrooms – 140 seats – to our pre-K program over the next five years. We’re
adding two classrooms each year and one in the fifth year in an effort to
achieve universal pre-K. Our program, begun in 2010, had grown to eight
classrooms last school year, but still could serve only about 21 percent of our
city’s 4-year-olds.
This year, we’ve begun the expansion by adding
one classroom at East End Community School and another at Rowe Elementary
School. A study of the relationship between student need and current pre-K
system capacity, conducted by the University of Southern Maine’s Data
Innovation Project, showed we have insufficient programming in certain areas of
the city. The selection of these two locations is an effort to address that
imbalance.
Students in the pre-K program will
demographically reflect the socio-economic make-up of the district overall,
where 55 percent of our students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
To ensure the success of our new pre-K
initiative, we also have hired our first pre-K program director: Suzanne
Chevalier, one of our elementary school teachers, who has many years of early
childhood education experience.
We also are working to establish before- and
after-school care options for our pre-K students. To take advantage of our
expanded pre-K, families of pre-K students need the same kind of extended
childcare services we offer to families of K-5 students. Services for pre-K
families are expected to be available in January 2020.
The Portland Public Schools has been one of
the leaders in the state in establishing and expanding pre-K opportunities. I
am pleased that Gov. Janet Mills now has made expanding pre-K in Maine a
priority, and look forward to support from the state as we continue to work
toward the important goal of offering pre-K to all Portland students.
