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Community Corner

All Day K

(Rob, there's a story here)
http://www.mywoonsocket.com/uploads/1-15-14_FDK_Powerpoint_Presentation.pdf (the real power point can be downloaded on the WED site)

Above is the link for the WED presentation for support of All Day Kindergarten. I have been a proponent of reinstating this program. I actually go beyond that and state that the city actually LOSES money by not having All Day K. It is very hard for me to support my conclusion since there is nowhere to find a breakdown of cost/benefits for a single grade level. This leads me to another point. If you take the week: Sunday-Saturday, and I ask you which day is the most important, you could make an argument for each and every day of the week. The conclusion would be: they are all important and should be considered part of the week as a whole. This same thinking SHOULD apply to grade levels. The school system is K-12, not 1-12, not K-3 skip 4 and 5-12. Change K to 0 if that makes more sense to you. But don't cut out Sunday and don't cut out Kindergarten.

From a financial view, cutting out K didn't make sense. How can you fiscally cut something if you can't determine it's tangible value? There is no line item called Kindergarten. Just as there is no line item called First Grade. It comes as a package deal. Same buildings, same principals, same janitors, same tater tots, same BUSES. To cut the program, you must estimate the savings. What is not estimated is the residual. You diminish the value of those buildings, principals, janitors, tots, and buses by decreasing their efficiency. Think of like this: one bus with 20 kids costs the same as one bus with 25 kids. However, the per pupil cost has decreased. So what you save in cutting teachers, you lose in state funding and in overall effectiveness. 

All that being said, if we look at page 15 of the power point, we see the estimated costs of reinstating Full Day K. The spreadsheet is laid out terribly, but we can at least get some info out of it. Most notably is the surplus we will carry in the first couple years, aka NOW. After the initial bump, you will see the reoccurring cost associated with keeping the program. One thing I would like to point out, some of the costs outlined here are actually the result of having to relocate some 5th and 6th graders. This, in turn, is the result of closing a number of elementary schools in recent years. Let me explain it differently, because there was no All Day K, we closed the schools that would have accommodated  the All Day K. It's like selling your truck because you no longer needed your truck, but now you need your truck again and you don't have it. You wished you sold your motorcycle instead. We no longer have the schools that housed K-5, so now we have to shuffle everything around. Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight works too.

Let me get back to the point. Buses. Right now we pay extra $ for buses in the middle of the day. With All Day K, those kids will ride the same friggin bus as everyone else. The power point doesn't appear to account for this savings. Surprising because this is a very tangible figure. I would also argue the cost vs revenue of Kindergarten kids. As the spreadsheet shows, your extra costs are directly related to adding new teachers. Supply costs are low, there is no athletic program, no guidance counselors, no computer labs, no frogs to dissect, no in-house suspension, no $100 calculus books, no police detail. Kids in Kindergarten are actually sent home with a list of supplies to bring to class from home. So tell me, when the state is paying 80% of the bill to send each child to school, who gets more bang for the buck? The high-schooler or the Kindergartener? I would even argue that a child in K actually nets a gain for the city. But alas, there is no breakdown to support this. 

My final point is this: if you wanted to lose weight, the easiest thing to do is to cut off your left leg. But, you might want to consider what you're really losing before you do that. Welcome to Kindergarten, Woonsocket. 

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