Proposal would change kindergarten cut-off date

By NATALIA MIELCZAREK Staff Writer - THE TENNESSEAN

The idea of looking at her son and saying "John, honey, they changed the rules, and you have to stay at home with Mommy another year" pains Michelle Rocha.

Her son will turn 5 in August and is scheduled to go to kindergarten this fall. But a lawmaker from rural northeast Tennessee wants kindergartners to be older before they start school and is proposing increasing the age requirement by 3 months.

"That would be very bad," said Rocha, a mother of four kids, two of whom have yet to attend kindergarten. "He has two older siblings, and he knows he's supposed to start school. He's ready to go. That's all he can talk about."

Such a change would affect thousands of children like John born between July 1 and Sept. 30, the period in which a child must be 5 before starting kindergarten.

Its prospects for passage are uncertain. Similar efforts have failed in the past, but the proposal touches an age-old question: When are kids ready?

The proposal comes as Gov. Phil Bredesen is pushing in the opposite direction: starting children in schools earlier through pre-kindergarten programs. Just last week, Bredesen announced plans to funnel $343 million in new dollars into education, including an additional $25 million to expand the state-funded pre-kindergarten program.

Rep. David Hawk, R-Greeneville, said he wants to shift the cutoff date to help close a vast maturity gap among young students. The age disparity, he said, translates into various levels of skills and abilities, setting the younger kids up for failure and making it hard for teachers to do their job.

"Three months in the life of an individual who's less than 60 months old, that's a huge amount of time in development," Hawk said.

"Kindergarten teachers in (my) county have been concerned with some of their students starting too young and not being physically or socially ready. They've had several students who've been held back. It's to no fault of the children; they were just not enough developed as some of the older children are."

Hawk said he's seen within his own family the difference a few months make in preparing children for the rigors of kindergarten.

His daughter, whose birthday is in August, was mature enough to enter kindergarten, he said, but her cousin, whose birthday falls in July, needs more time.

Patty White, a kindergarten teacher of 22 years, said the maturity disparity sometimes can make for a painful first year at school.

"The skills that go along with it, the attention span, the language skills, are different. I find that the younger the children come in, the more time I have to spend with them the first semester getting them ready to learn," said White, who teaches at Holy Rosary Academy, a private Catholic school in Donelson.

Sending some of the younger children to kindergarten may sometimes color their future school experience, White said.

"Those children get stressed, and they see that there are other children who can already do these things and they can't," she said. "When you're trying to do a whole group lesson, they become disruptive because they can't sit still as long, and it's not their fault."

Research is lacking

Education scholars say that there's no research that shows that moving age requirements for kindergarten, presumably giving younger children more time to get ready, leads to better achievement.

Even if the bill passed, trying to eliminate the maturity gap by changing the kindergarten eligibility date is futile, said Mimi Howard, early learning expert at Education Commission of the States, a Denver, Co.-based nonprofit and non-partisan education policy group.

"At that age, kids are so different, developmentally anyway, and no matter when the cutoff date is, you're going to have kids who're essentially 12 months apart in terms of age, if not their development," she said.

"The people who want to wait until their kids are older to let them into kindergarten are typically policy makers who think that that's going to increase student achievement because kids will be older, more ready.

"There's really no research that has proven that to be true."

And mothers like Rocha worry that their kids would miss out.

Logic has a flip side

That's where pre-K comes in, Hawk said. With Bredesen's push to expand the state-funded program next year, kids who'd miss the new age requirement could get a head start in pre-K, he said.

But, as another scholar points out, the argument can be made in the other direction.

"If we look at more children starting pre-K, that makes them more prepared even if they start kindergarten earlier; that's one of the arguments used against moving that date," said Tisha Sanders, clinical assistant professor of early childhood education at Peabody College at Vanderbilt University.

If the reason behind the proposal is to give younger children more time to prepare for kindergarten, maybe the solution lies elsewhere, she said.

"The question may be that kindergarten is too hard, and they're pushing down too much academically," Sanders said.

"Are the expectations for 5-year-olds too high? "Should they look at the program they're offering, not the child's age?"

Earlier attempts failed

About 20 states require the fifth birthday to happen on or before Sept. 1. A half dozen leave it up to local districts.

At least two other attempts to change the age cutoff date in Tennessee failed in the last decade, in part for fears from educators that teaching posts would be lost as a result of a smaller kindergarten population in the first year.

Rep. Leslie Winningham, a Democrat from Huntsville, was one co-sponsor. He wanted to require kids to be 5 by July 31 rather than Sept. 30.

He said he doesn't predict much success this time around either.

"I think it's probably dead on arrival," said Winningham, chairman of the House Education Committee.

"It's a great idea but it's just a hard sell. There's an initial cost saving, but ultimately it comes back to haunt everyone.

"And with the pre-K program, kids are going to kindergarten better prepared, whether they're older or not."