Of Yorktown News
Full-day kindergarten is a top priority for the Yorktown Central School District and district officials hope to implement the program in time for the 2014-15 school year, Superintendent Dr. Ralph Napolitano announced at Monday’s School Board meeting.
Currently, Bronxville and Katonah-Lewisboro are the only other school districts in Westchester County that do not have full-day kindergarten.
Yorktown has always operated with a half-day kindergarten structure and the topic has been discussed for decades. The idea was voted down by the public when it was last proposed in 2006 for mostly financial reasons, Napolitano said.
“The primary reason for that outcome was there would be a duel expense involved with full-time kindergarten,” he said at Monday’s board of education meeting. “The first expense would be a physical expansion of both our primary buildings, because that would have been a necessity at the time. The second cost is a cost that would still be present now, and that would of course be the increased personnel needs to provide the full-day experience."
Napolitano, however, believes the time is right to revisit the idea.
“Since that time, I think several significant things have occurred,” he said. “Our population has decreased, allowing for more usable space within our current buildings. So we do not believe there would be any additional monies needed to expand [the buildings] to allow this program to take place.”
Napolitano said the introduction of Common Core curriculum and APPR testing have also increased the amount of work and the type of work that is required for elementary-aged students.
“With a half-day program,” Napolitano said, “I think what our kindergarten teachers try to do is cram in as much work as they can in the short amount of time that they have with the children, and then our first and second grade teachers try to play a lot of catch up to ensure the students are exactly where they need to be by the time they get to the third grade and start taking their first group of rigorous assessments.”
Napolitano’s words were music to Judy Giannelli’s ears. Giannelli has been a kindergarten teacher in the district for 24 years.
“I am somewhat speechless and a little emotional,” Giannelli said minutes after hearing the announcement. “Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I had this much more time with the children.”
Giannelli said more time with her students would help balance the “overwhelming” curriculum changes and that full-day kindergarten is needed now more than ever.
“There’s already so much more for the children to do,” Giannelli said. “Since [2006] it has grown and grown and grown. I have to pick and choose, very carefully, what I need to teach, how long I’m going to teach it.”
Without a full day, the increased workload in kindergarten is coming at the expense of play time and other social experiences, which Giannelli believes are sorely needed at that age.
“I’d like to have as much time as everyone else in this district,” Giannelli said. “There’s just so much that I wish I could do with them. I’m very thrilled to hear that this is going to be discussed and reviewed.”
Prior to the Oct. 7 meeting, Napolitano met behind closed doors with Assistant Superintendents Tom Cole and Florence O’Connor.
“At the meeting we decided to outline the steps that we needed to follow,” Napolitano said. “Then we will incorporate them into a report that we would present to the board first, to the school community second, and then to the community at large to determine whether or not this is a step that we want to take.”
The report will feature demographic studies and potential additional costs of personnel, building and transportation. Napolitano also floated the idea of bringing in Realtors that have experience with school systems to explain how full-day kindergarten might counterbalance some of the initial costs that may impact the tax rate. The district also intends to explore state aid in transitioning to a full-day program.
Yorktown, which has a current enrollment of 187 kindergarten students, has carried out demographic reports in the past, but Cole said this report will be “far more in-depth than anything we’ve looked at before.”
“We need some idea of how many students would be migrating home from a private setting, currently with full-day kindergarten,” Cole said. “We also need to know how many new families will be enticed to our community for that program itself. That’s going to dictate the number of sections, the sections will dictate the number of rooms, the rooms will the number of teachers and so forth. So that would be the most critical piece of information in the whole process.”
The proposal received the backing of the Board of Education.
“I think that we all agree that this is something we just have to find a way to get done,” said board Vice President Karen Corrado.
Liz Kelsey was a first-grade teacher in the district before switching over to kindergarten, believing full-day was “right around the corner.” She has since moved back to first-grade.
“I was excited to be a part of the possibility,” Kelsey said. “We worked pretty hard to try and make it happen in 2006, and it didn’t.”
Kelsey said switching to full-day kindergarten would help not only kindergarten teachers, but would relieve the burden on first-grade teachers, too.
“It is hard for a six-year-old to go from a half-day to a full-day,” she said. “We have so much to teach, but we have to understand that things are changing for them. I really believe that if we have this full-day, which they really deserve, right from the get-go, that transition to first will be smoother and we could really hit the ground running.”
Napolitano and board members agreed that a town hall-type discussion with members of the public might be necessary to gauge the desire for full-day kindergarten and if, potentially, taxpayers would possibly support overriding a 2 percent tax levy cap to make it a possibility.
“There is a value here that supersedes everything else that we’ve spoken about,” Napolitano said. “When you talk about the emotional, when you talk about the social, when you talk about [the teacher’s] role, the kids sometimes miss those nuances mostly because their time is lacking.”
Napolitano did not set any real timeline, but said there will be an ongoing discussion at School Board work sessions to “keep the conversation alive.” Napolitano and Cole will report back to the board once the studies are completed.
“If we’re going to do it, we’ve got to do it right,” said board President Jackie Carbone. “Because this may be the district’s last shot.”
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