Free all-day kindergarten is growing trend

Alesha Wening got a $10,000 gift last week courtesy of the Burnsville School District.

Wening has three children who will be going to kindergarten in the coming years, and it would have cost her nearly $10,000 to pay for them to go to all-day kindergarten instead of the normal half-day offering.

But the Burnsville-Eagan-Savage schools have decided to spend $1.5 million to make all-day kindergarten free and available to every family in the district starting in the fall.

School officials in Burnsville and elsewhere said all-day kindergarten improves academic performance and eventually provides academic benefits ranging from improved test scores to lower dropout rates in later years.

"Our school board looked at it and said it's better to pay up front than on the back end," said Bruce Rimstad, the business manager for the Inver Grove Heights School District, which started free full-day kindergarten in the fall of 2011.

Rimstad said the move required hiring two teachers and meant an additional cost of $148,000 to the district. It also meant that Inver Grove Heights could compete to retain more students, some of whom were going to South St. Paul, which already had free all-day kindergarten, Rimstad said.

Other districts around the metro are following suit. The Anoka-Hennepin School District expanded its free full-day kindergarten offerings to more elementary schools at a cost of more than $1 million.

"Full-day kindergarten ... is the right thing to do," Burnsville Superintendent Randy Clegg told his school board. "Full-day kindergarten is educationally sound; it is also financially sound. The earlier we can invest in educating children at all levels of development, the less we will need to spend on academic remediation later on."

Economic burdens

Clegg said that economic factors have kept hundreds of families from enrolling their children in all-day kindergarten and that this was affecting the academic growth of children who could use extra instruction and class hours.

"The design of our current kindergarten program ... denies a growing number of our children the same educational experience and opportunities," Clegg said. "All of our students, regardless of their family income, should be afforded the right and opportunity to benefit from our public full-day kindergarten program."

Wening and other parents agree with Clegg. Wening said she rushed home the night of the board vote to see if the proposal had passed.

That won't be a problem when her three boys -- Deacon, Isaac and Alex, ranging in age from 4 to nearly 2 -- start kindergarten.

"If they hadn't done it free, we wouldn't have been able to do all-day," Wening said.

Susan Brott, a spokeswoman for the West St. Paul-Mendota Heights-Eagan School District, said the district studied the idea of free all-day kindergarten several years ago but did not pursue it because of the cost. "We were looking at it, but we obviously did not have the money," Brott said.

Instead, she said, the district decided to make a concerted effort to subsidize families who wanted all-day kindergarten but could not afford it.

"Early interventions are proven to improve student achievement," Brott said. "We make sure that people are not being turned away because they can't pay. We see the value of all-day kindergarten."