Dunbarton voters will be asked today to choose between eliminating full-day kindergarten or moving some sixth-graders to a different school.
A warrant article proposed by the Dunbarton School Board would pay Bow $97,192 next year in tuition for up to eight sixth-grade students. Those students, which represent about a quarter of Dunbarton’s sixth grade, would be headed to Bow Memorial School a year ahead of their peers.
If Article 3 fails to pass, school officials say the district will have to drop back to a half-day kindergarten program, just one year after full-day kindergarten was approved.
The problem, school board member Jeff Trexler said, is space.
Dunbarton Elementary School has 13 classrooms, and when full-day kindergarten was passed last year, the school had a sixth grade class of 21 students that fit into one room. However, this year’s incoming sixth grade class has 31 students and will have to be split into two classes. On top of that, the incoming kindergarten class has 22 students, double what the district was expecting and too many students to have in one class, Trexler said.
The district follows the state’s Department of Education class size guidelines, which recommends grades K-2 have no more than 25 students, but they strive to have no more than 20 to ensure students have a quality education. They also follow the state’s guidelines for grades three through six, which recommends no more than 30 students in a classroom, but they strive for no more than 25.
“We really should revisit our kindergarten policy, because even with 20 students its going to be hard to herd that many cats,” Trexler said. “You have to think these kids are in school for the first time.”
Space has always been a concern for full-day kindergarten’s success in Dunbarton. The warrant was written so that the school board would be able determine on a yearly basis whether the program would continue to be full-day based on available space. The school had 35 students in kindergarten this year, according to the Department of Education.
Trexler said the benefits of having a full-day program available to students was worth the potential risk of not all students getting the opportunity to participate. He also said the board did not want to wait on pursuing an all-day program due to space issues until space actually became a problem, like it did this year.
“The board is very committed to having a full-day program,” he said. “We’ve seen that it has tremendous value; the extra learning time it provides students is wonderful.”
Full-day kindergarten programs better prepare students academically and socially than students in half-day classes, especially for low-income and minority students, according to the National Education Association. All-day programs are also beneficial to parents, who do not have to deal with the challenges of picking children up halfway through the school day or arranging other child care services.
Trexler said parents chose to pursue private kindergarten programs or did not pursue kindergarten at all when the district had a half-day program, causing students to be at various learning levels when they started school in first grade. Of this year’s 26 first grade students, only nine participated in the half-day program during the 2015-16 school year, he said.
To combat the space issue, Trexler said the board will be asking voters to approve a bond for an addition to the elementary school in 2018, which would include an additional classroom.
There are also two articles on the warrant this year that address the issue: Article 7 will ask voters to spend up to $100,000 to pay for architectural design and engineering fees associated with construction and renovations at DES, and Article 6 would ask voters to raise $240,000 for the district’s capital reserve fund.
If Article 3 passes, SAU 67 Superintendent Dean Cascadden said whether or not students go to Bow at all will depend on the number of families willing to send their children. While he said a survey of fifth-grade parents identified enough students to free up space for the full-day program, there is the possibility they may back out. There’s also the chance more parents will volunteer their children than planned for; in that case, a lottery will be conducted.
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)