Getting Them Started Right : Education: A special kindergarten program is geared for children considered not ready for the regular classroom. Some schools and parents love the concept, but state officials see possible harm.

Emilie Spratt recalls with delight the day her 5-year-old son came home from his special kindergarten class at Pacific School in Manhattan Beach and announced, “We talked about Mr. Monet.”

That’s Monet as in Claude, the artist, the master of Impressionism.

Spratt says the program, a special kindergarten designed for youngsters who are not considered ready for regular kindergarten, enriched the lives of all three of her children--and spared them the pain of being in over their heads.

State education officials say special kindergartens should be eliminated, citing early childhood education experts who consider such programs scientifically unsound, if not emotionally unhealthy.

A better approach, state educators say, is to adopt a “developmental curriculum” in regular kindergarten through second grade that emphasizes hands-on learning to accommodate children in various stages of maturity. In this way, children at varying levels of development could enter school on the regular schedule.

But it isn’t easy dissuading local school districts from using special kindergartens, which have developed a strong following among parents and teachers.

“I think,” Spratt says, “(my children) are a lot more self-assured than other children are.”

Mary Anne Doms says the decision to put her daughter Taylor in the Pre-Elementary Program (PEP), Manhattan Beach’s special kindergarten program, was “the best thing we ever did.”

“She was very, very shy,” Doms says of Taylor, now a cheerful first-grader. “And some of her small motor skills were not well developed. . . . She was very reticent to talk at certain times. In nursery school, she spent a lot of time off by herself.”

Melissa Watson says PEP was so good for her 8-year-old son, who is small for his age and has a November birthday, that she hopes her 4-year-old will have the experience too. After children complete special kindergarten, they go on to regular kindergarten--a year later than they would have normally.

“The problem,” Watson says, “is this hurried child mentality. (Some parents) want their child to be first in everything. It’s so ridiculous.”

Known loosely as developmental or pre-kindergarten programs, the special classes are based on the idea that, regardless of intelligence, young children mature at vastly different rates.

For example, a child who has memorized the alphabet and learned to recognize a long list of words may be unable to handle a pair of scissors well, follow directions or socialize comfortably with other children.

Many little boys, as parents discover and scientists have shown in numerous studies, are often noticeably behind girls in development, particularly in verbal skills.

What is more, children with late summer or fall birthdays can be eight or 10 months younger chronologically than their kindergarten classmates. In California, the cutoff birthday date for kindergarten is Dec. 2.

Educators who support programs such as PEP say they prevent painful decisions later about whether to hold back children who do not do well in kindergarten, first or second grade. Children pushed into kindergarten too early, they say, risk failure later.

In the South Bay, besides in Manhattan Beach, special kindergartens are offered in the Palos Verdes schools, the Hermosa Beach City School District and--for the first year ever--in the El Segundo schools.

In those districts, children are screened for signs of developmental and social maturation, but ultimately the parents decide whether they want to place their child in PEP or in regular kindergarten.

Carol Caballero, principal of Vista View School in Hermosa Beach, credits her district’s special kindergarten program with making more children successful in school. “We really do believe we have a lot less failure with learning to read and do math,” Caballero said.

Says Christine Norvell, principal of Manhattan’s Pacific School: “If we had an opportunity to just let children go through school at their own pace, I think we’d have children who were much happier and productive in society. We’re pushing children so hard. Let them be children.”

Kate Walsh, who teaches one of the two PEP classes at Pacific, says her two sons went through PEP and that she regrets that the program, which is 8 years old, was not available for their older sister, who had a Nov. 18 birthday.

“She was precocious,” Walsh says. “She was an early walker and an early talker.”

But when Walsh put her daughter into kindergarten at the appropriate time, she found she had an unhappy, anxious child on her hands. She had the child repeat kindergarten, telling her that the only failure was “Mommy’s.”

“It was Mommy who put her in school too soon,” Walsh says, recalling what she said to the child.

Walsh’s classroom is a fun-filled, stimulating place in which children learn through play and engage in a broad range of activities. Chagall art posters hang on the walls near pint-size painting easels, and rows of paper cutouts dangle from strings stretched across the classroom.

PEP graduates are by no means chagrined about not entering kindergarten on the usual schedule. They also praise the program.

Referring to a female classmate who is now in the sixth grade with him, Robby Ford, for example, said, “I think she should have gone to PEP, ‘cause she went to first grade, and she had to be held back.”

Despite such reviews, many educators believe special kindergarten represent the wrong approach to schooling.

The state, which strongly opposes holding children back at any grade level, wants districts to eliminate special kindergartens. The state does not have the power to order the cancellation of the programs, however.

New research, experts in the state Department of Education point out, holds that while young children may mature at different rates, that does not justify delaying their entrance into regular kindergarten.

The practice, which experts call “red-shirting,” leaves children with the same self-esteem problems as children who are later forced to repeat a grade, says Ada Hand, a consultant in the state’s elementary education office.

Studies show that special kindergarten children do not over the long haul perform any better in school than children who are held back in subsequent grades, she explained. By about the third grade, Hand says, different maturation rates among children disappear.

The state and early childhood experts say there’s a better way to handle the different maturation rates of children. Their answer: developmentally appropriate curricula, which the state is pushing school districts to adopt.

Torrance did so this year, abandoning its special kindergarten program.

These new curricula, for children in kindergarten through second grade, represent a hands-on education for children: They learn not by rote but by doing. The experts say such curricula more closely match the way children learn naturally and can be adapted by teachers to fit the needs of individual students.

Many children have not done well in school, experts say, because education at an early level has stressed rote learning methods, in which rows of children listen to the teacher talk and practice the same thing over and over on work sheets.

Still, doing away with the special kindergarten programs in districts that now have them will probably meet with resistance.

If they aren’t a good idea, says El Segundo school superintendent William Manahan, “How come parents like (them) so much?”