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New transition program to prepare students for kindergarten

MICHAEL KELLY The Marietta Times Koral Fleming reviews teaching materials Friday for the class of transitional kindergarten students coming under her care later this month at Harmar Elementary School. Fleming will lead the Marietta City Schools district's first such class.

Like other Marietta City Schools teachers, Koral Fleming is getting ready for class.

But unlike the others, Fleming is preparing to lead a new effort by the district to better prepare its youngest pupils for what’s ahead.

Fleming is the teacher for the transitional kindergarten class, a new group made up of students deemed to require additional preparation before entering first grade. Those students will get two years of kindergarten rather than the traditional one year. The first year will be in Fleming’s class, the second in a kindergarten class at the students’ home schools.

As in so many other facets of public education, kindergarten now is no longer your grandmother’s kindergarten. Students are preparing for the academic and social demands of first grade, which is also substantially more challenging than it was 20 years ago, and those who don’t have at least some preschool background are at a significant disadvantage.

Marietta City Schools has no pre-kindergarten, and many preschools are beyond the financial reach of economically disadvantaged families, Fleming said.

“Without that, it’s hard to get a child up to the expectations and standards,” she said. “Pre-kindergarten has become the new kindergarten.”

Fleming comes to the position with substantial experience. She grew up in Belpre, graduated from Belpre High School and obtained a bachelors degree in education from Ohio University. She is nearing completion of masters studies with West Virginia University and is nationally board certified in K-12 literacy instruction. She has six years of experience in pre-kindergarten instruction in Wood County, W.Va., and had a year of teaching fourth grade before applying for the transitional kindergarten position in Marietta.

Sitting in her new, brightly painted classroom in Harmar Elementary School on Friday morning, Fleming said she wants to spend the beginning of the year building a sense of trust and safety with her students.

“I want to set the kids up for success,” she said. “The social-emotional is a huge element, a huge part of growing, developing the understanding of how to work with other kids, collaborate, those are the skills I want to build in them, especially at the beginning of the year.”

The course materials she’ll use are similar to those used in an ordinary kindergarten, she said, including a guided reading series and the same math instructional resource but the pace of learning is dialed back, and involves a lot of movement and hands-on activities.

Part of the driving force behind the transitional kindergarten is something that comes further down the road for students: the state-mandated third grade reading test. It’s a pass-or-fail exam, with those who don’t pass being retained from entering fourth grade.

Last year, according to figures provided by Marietta City Schools curriculum director Jona Hall, 14 third graders needed additional support through summer school programs, and even so five of them didn’t pass.

“The score changes every year, it’s literally a moving target, and every year the stakes are raised higher,” Hall said. Although the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment is useful for evaluating children as they enter kindergarten, it’s not necessarily a predictor of what might happen in third grade, she said.

“What the KRA tells us is whether, at that point, the child is ready to learn,” she said. “It’s not only a measure of academics but also of social and emotional learning. It tells us whether they need that extra year.”

But if a child is going to put an additional year into a grade level, it’s better for everyone if that year is kindergarten rather than a later grade, she said.

“By third grade they already have made established friends, they see them moving ahead, there are social and emotional impacts from that,” Hall said. “With transitional kindergarten, they start for a year at Harmar, then move to their home school for the kindergarten year. It’s a better social transition.”

Fleming said she’s had years of experience with parents whose children get a second year of pre-kindergarten.

“In pre-K when I would discuss keeping the child another year, they were apprehensive at first, but I would sit down with them and explain that it’s better to keep them back at a younger age than later, when they’ve made a lot of friends,” she said. “At that age, it’s easier for children to go with the flow, and for those that I’ve had, in the second year the growth was tremendous.”

“I just want the parents and families to know that I want this to be a positive experience,” she said.

Sandy Winans, a veteran kindergarten teacher at Harmar, said she welcomes the new program.

“For quite a few years the staff has noticed that not all the kids are ready, and when they’re not ready we have to do some interventions, sometimes a retention. The transitional kindergarten is a godsend,” she said. “The research is really behind this as far as the positives it can bring, better socialization, better reading, better math. There is no downside.”

“In Marietta with no public preschool, she said, “a lot of kids just aren’t ready. A lot of folks just don’t realize what kindergarten is like now.”

Fleming, she said, comes well equipped to lead the effort. “Koral is going to be such an asset, with her background in early childhood education and her temperament.”

Pre-screening for incoming kindergarten students takes place Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Kindergarten classes begin the following week.

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