A group of education stakeholders gathered Thursday to argue that when lawmakers passed a bill last session to raise the kindergarten age by the 2024-25 school year, they didn’t consider how a quick implementation would impact families.
The legislation aligns Connecticut with most other states, which require kindergarten students be 5 years old by Sept. 1, instead of the previous cutoff of Jan. 1.
The bill had broad support, as many experts and families agree that kindergarten is not age appropriate for 4-year-olds. However, direct stakeholders, including parents, superintendents and early childhood advocates, are saying the legislature moved too fast by trying to implement the law within a year and are now urging them to delay it.
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“Implementation has been problematic at best and unjustly inequitable at worst. This legislation left as is, will certainly lead to discriminatory treatment of children,” said Kathryn Scheinberg Meyer, the director of the Yale Child Study Center Medical-Legal Partnership Project at the Center for Children’s Advocacy, at a news conference Thursday morning. “If the legislature had given the stakeholders involved, … the time to really navigate this transition, we wouldn’t be here today. Instead, this law went forward without enough public input and without consideration of the consequences on the capacity of providers and families.”
The age shift has caused concern and confusion for parents who are working to navigate waiver processes that differ among Connecticut’s 169 public school districts. It is also happening as the number of pre-K slots in the state is the lowest it’s been in nearly two decades.
“When thinking about this law, we think about the 4-year-olds and the 5-year-olds who are about to go into kindergarten, but what we don’t think about as much is the rippling effect of the toddlers and their placement for early childhood development,” said Stephanie Deceus, a New Haven mother of three children between the ages of 2 and 5. “What we don’t think about as much is the families who’ve been planning for years and what we don’t think about as much is the financial burdens this is gonna put on families for the next year to come and families who are already struggling. I want to be clear, I do not disagree with this law at all, … what I am concerned about, however, is the haste in which this law is being implemented.”
Lawmakers, who helped draft the legislation, admitted this week that they didn’t anticipate these challenges nor expect pushback while working on the language and implementation of the bill.
[RELATED: As CT kindergarten age changes, worries about transition emerge]
“What is actually interesting about this is that when it came through the Education Committee, there was just broad support … Everyone — from educators and advocacy groups — they were, for the most part, almost entirely unified that this was the best implementation,” said Rep. Mary Welander, D-Orange. “So when we all started getting a little bit of pushback, at first, I was surprised. In hindsight, we should have anticipated this. … It is important for us, as a state, to join 45 other states in the country that have a 5-year-old kindergarten start date of Sept. 1, but we also have to look at how can we do this in a responsible manner. There was a lot going on last session, and we just didn’t have the long conversations that I think would have been helpful to avoid some of this.”
“There’s a lot of conversation about, well, did we act too fast? Should we have pushed the start year a year back? All those conversations are being had right now,” said Sen. Doug McCrory, co-chair of the Education Committee at a committee hearing Wednesday.
With the current implementation process, the state Department of Education has left it up to municipalities to navigate the shift, requiring that districts provide a waiver process with written parental consent and an age-appropriate assessment as the only criteria.
[CT kindergarten age change: What to know about the new cutoff]
This means there isn’t any uniformity in how districts are handling the waiver and assessment process.
For the upcoming 2024-25 school year, some districts are requiring only a written request from a parent or guardian for the waiver, as they plan to implement an assessment plan by the following year. Others have already set up processes to analyze a student’s social and emotional behaviors. Waiver request timelines also vary, with some cutoff dates in February and others accepting requests on a rolling basis well into the summer.
Districts like Bridgeport and Hartford are expecting hundreds of kindergarten waivers for the upcoming school year.
“There’s some communities that have space [to accommodate more pre-K students] and others don’t,” said Beth Bye, commissioner of the Office of Early Childhood, at an Education Committee meeting Wednesday morning. “The cities that are growing have the biggest challenge.”
In a smaller district, like Ansonia, there are already 40 families on the pre-K waitlist, Superintendent Joseph DiBacco said.
“I’m worried that your zip code — as much as a strong determiner of your overall health — is also going to determine based on the testing or waiver requirement if you have early access to kindergarten education. I’m worried that all districts across the state, even though we’re all doing our very best to comply with this law, that the waiver process is going to be different and is inadvertently going to create inconsistencies. … I’m worried that many families aren’t prepared for the costs of the additional year of preschool,” DiBacco said. “I’m worried we rushed this process.”
Rep. Corey Paris, D-Stamford, said he and other fellow lawmakers plan to continue advocating for an implementation delay.
“This mandate, which I thought was incredibly thoughtful and has been a long time in the works, is a good law. … This mandate though, needs a little bit more time to catch up with the systems on a local level,” Paris said. “We should delay this for at least a year so that it does not hurt the children, hurt our families, exacerbate an already fragile early childhood education system and also stress out our teachers who are already in dire straits in terms of needing more resources.”