Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/669874
36 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 5.16 of the early-childhood enrollees are kids who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch and are considered "at risk." Tis year about half of the kids who came to kindergarten from JCPS' early-childhood programs tested ready for kindergarten. Hardly perfect, but the kids who spent the frst fve years of life at home with a parent? Only 27 percent. Kids who went to private childcare or preschool settings fared best, with nearly 67 percent deemed ready for kindergarten. Within the last three years, the BRIGANCE data have had a ripple efect. Te Louisville Free Public Library launched the 1,000 Books Before Kindergarten Challenge. JCPS has expanded kindergarten readiness summer camps. A new goal: By 2020, JCPS wants kindergarten readiness to hit 77 percent. In an efort to achieve that, JCPS unveiled a website last spring — Ready 4K. (You can fnd it on the JCPS homepage.) It lists all 42 skills a child should know before kindergarten. From there, click away at dozens of educational activities, videos and games. JCPS has partnered with churches and community organizations to get the word out about this resource. But Cooter says even if parents don't have the internet they can practice "stoplight skills." If stopped at a trafc light, she says, "Ask your child, 'How many red cars do you see? What color shirt am I wearing?' Tere is no magic to this." Rodney Starling Jr., a tall, polite six-year- old with round brown eyes, sits at his kitchen table, black crayon in hand, drawing curly hair on a portrait of his mom. It's spring break, a week of from Gray's kindergarten class. Still, this morning he completed a colorful subtraction workbook front to back because that's just Rodney. "He loves to learn," his soft-spoken mom, Sharon Sloan, says. An only child, Rodney lives in Shively and comes from a family that values education. Sloan is a longtime school resource ofcer at Stuart Middle School. Rodney's dad is a former teacher. Te boy's perfect spelling tests are taped to the wall by his bed, just above a stufed Spider-Man doll. His mom proudly displays his honor roll and perfect-attendance awards. So when Rodney was a toddler in daycare and Sloan noticed that his teachers misspelled words on his daily report and made grammatical errors on his art projects (e.g., "Today color is brown"), she yanked him. Sloan enrolled him in a preschool at Coleridge-Taylor Elementary. Rodney's teacher immediately gave Sloan tips, like to follow the words with her fnger when reading to him. Sloan even started sight-word fashcards. In kindergarten, Rodney has blossomed. "He can probably read better than some of our eighth- graders," Sloan says, referring to students at Stuart Middle. Some economists rave about early-childhood education, arguing that investing in kids early can show as much as a 10 percent per-year return on investment based on reduced costs in remedial education and health and criminal-justice spending. Sloan has observations of her own from Stuart Middle, one of the state's worst-performing middle schools. "Once kids' academics slide, they feel dumb," she says. "Tey start to act out." On the Monday after spring break, Rodney sits on Gray's carpet cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, staring up at his teacher as she points to words in a large, vibrant picture book. "Clucky Clucky found a balloon," Gray reads, then pauses. "She blew and blew and it grew and grew." Today's writing assignment is to predict what will happen to that balloon. Rodney and his classmates scurry back to their seats and fip open composition books. For Gray, teaching writing is one of her most difcult tasks. So much to conquer — spacing, punctuation, transferring sounds onto a page. "It's so much harder to teach writing, especially when (their skill levels are) so far apart. You want your higher-level writers to grow and keep challenging themselves, but you're stuck over here with someone who won't independently sound out the word 'big,' a three-letter word." Gray has a teaching assistant. Tat helps. But as the year goes on, the gap between kids who excel and those who struggle grows larger and becomes more noticeable. Rodney grips his No. 2 pencil and blazes through his answer, This year about half of the kids who came to kindergarten from JCPS' early- childhood programs tested ready for kindergarten. Hardly perfect, but the kids who spent the frst fve years of life at home with a parent? Only 27 percent. Kids who went to private childcare or preschool settings fared best, with nearly 67 percent deemed ready for kindergarten.