Struggling District Ponders 2nd Year of Kindergarten

Their campuses crowded with poor children struggling to learn English, Santa Ana school officials are proposing a radical idea: Why not turn kindergarten into a two-year program, effectively stretching students’ school careers to 14 years?

The two-year kindergarten proposal, which in its preliminary form already has majority support on the school board and won a favorable response from the state superintendent of public instruction, appears to be the first attempt in the nation to institutionalize an extra year of schooling for students at risk of failing.

“This sure as heck beats retaining them in eighth grade,” said Al Mijares, superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District. “Who says kindergarten has to be one year? In the bigger scheme of things, if a student graduates a little later, how is that going to hurt them?”

Mijares estimates that 70% of his incoming students--perhaps 3,500 children a year--would go into a second, more advanced year of kindergarten to give them extra time to learn English and bolster their basic skills in reading and math, at a taxpayer cost of about $15 million a year.

A few Southern California school systems, including Monrovia and Torrance, offer a second year for kindergartners who aren’t developmentally ready for first grade. Some private schools offer similar “bridge” years for children who need the extra help.

But Santa Ana, which has the highest percentage of Latino students of any large district in the state, is unusual because it is considering an overhauled school program directed not at individual child development but at formidable socioeconomic obstacles.

A full 85% of students in the Santa Ana district live in poverty and nearly three-fourths come to school speaking only Spanish, reflecting the demographics of Orange County’s most populous city. Many are the children of immigrants who have received little education themselves.

The Santa Ana proposal is only the latest of many moves nationwide to push kindergarten--which is not mandatory in California--away from finger-paint and circle time and toward academic achievement.

In California, ambitious new standards require kindergartners to read, write and even graph statistics. Lurking at the other end of students’ school careers is the new high school exit exam, which they will have to pass to receive a diploma. And in between lie years of testing.

As a result, educators are looking for ways to enrich the kindergarten experience, with the goal of making it a more reliable launching pad.

Also growing in popularity nationwide is full-day kindergarten, a concept also under discussion in Santa Ana. In 1999, 57% of all U.S. public and private school kindergartners spent a full day in their classrooms, up from 40% a decade before, federal statistics show.

Although still rare in California, where most schools offer only half-day kindergarten, all-day kindergarten is springing up in a handful of districts, including San Diego, Santa Clara and Campbell.

A new study from Montgomery County, Md., of nearly 8,000 children from low-income or immigrant families who attended full-day kindergarten last year found that they did much better than their counterparts from half-day classes.

But crowded districts such as Santa Ana and the Los Angeles Unified School District complain that they lack the classroom space to put all kindergartners in full-day programs.

Many kindergarten experts maintain that state-funded preschool would be one way to shore up the skills of children from low-income homes. The latest research indicates that much important brain development occurs before age 5.

But in California there is a waiting list for the limited state preschool program, said Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction.

Eastin for years has pushed the notion of universal preschool. She wants the state to finance programs for all 3- and 4-year-olds whose parents want the service. But the price tag of $5 billion a year has kept the idea from making headway.

With the state unwilling to fund a comprehensive preschool program for all the needy Santa Ana children, Mijares sees the two-year kindergarten as the way to go for his district. The superintendent also thinks his kindergartners are ill-equipped to handle a full day of classwork.

With a two-year kindergarten, the district would enroll thousands more students and get more state attendance money. The state generally pays public schools about $4,600 per student enrolled.

And if the state doesn’t pay for the extra year of schooling now, Santa Ana officials say, it will later when those children must be held back because of the state ban on advancing students to the next grade regardless of whether they are ready, or when they are unable to pass the high school exit exam.

The district might hold three or four shifts of kindergarten to fit all the students onto already crowded campuses, the latest going into early evening.

Because the idea is in such preliminary stages that it has not been aired publicly--in fact, staff has not yet written a report for presentation to the school board--it could face numerous hurdles, from objections at the state level to opposition from parents. The board will discuss the topic for the first time in November. But board members already are voicing favorable opinions.

“This really makes up for the deficiencies of the situation in which [students] find themselves,” said board member Nativo Lopez, who said he has been advocating the idea for more than two years. “The immigrant experience. The poverty. The limited-English proficiency. Those are all tremendous obstacles our children are called to overcome.”

Santa Ana’s radical proposal provoked a range of reactions from state officials.

Eastin, the state superintendent, found merit in the idea, given the language barrier that most of the children face.

“I think it’s a good idea for many children,” she said, adding that “it may have some problems in the governor’s office, strictly financial. It’s all about the cost.”

Ada Hand, a kindergarten expert in Eastin’s office, said she was concerned that Santa Ana’s proposal could end up placing students in separate academic tracks in violation of the Education Code, and added that it was not what state officials had in mind when they created the statewide retention program.

“I understand completely the problems they’re going through,” she said. “They have high expectations and insufficient resources to accomplish it. But that’s a real big policy decision. It’s a lot of money and it’s making a policy decision absent the policy makers’ input.”

But Mijares argues that programs that work in other districts don’t fit his district, which has some of the lowest scoring schools in the state on the Stanford 9 standardized test.

“Why should our curriculum mirror suburban school districts when our needs are completely different?” he said. “You have to look at what we’re up against in an urban setting like Santa Ana.”

Extra Hour Added in 9th Grade

Already this year, Santa Ana is forcing all ninth-graders out of bed an hour early for an extra period designed to help them pass the high school exit exam. Mijares has also taken the highly controversial step of reassigning principals of low-performing schools.

The two-year kindergarten proposal has gotten mixed reactions from some parents.

Berta Ramirez, who works in a T-shirt factory, said she would not mind if her daughter, now in kindergarten, had to repeat the grade.

“For me, it would be better for my daughter to know English leaving kindergarten than to just go to first grade,” Ramirez said in Spanish. She does not speak English, and her daughter speaks little.

But Patty Olvera, treasurer of the district’s PTA council, said she was not sure how she felt about it.

“I’m uncertain as to whether it will really make a difference,” said Olvera, whose children attend middle and high school. “You would have to be sure these teachers in the second year would really be effective in what they are doing. . . . On the other hand, you have to try new things to get results.”

Even if it becomes an official part of Santa Ana’s educational program, the additional year of kindergarten would not be mandatory. Students with adequate skills at the end of the first year of kindergarten could advance to first grade. Mijares said most children in Santa Ana probably would not fit that description, and he thinks their parents would agree.

Peer into one of the kindergarten classrooms at Grant Elementary School near downtown Santa Ana, and it’s easy to see why.

Many of the children in teacher Gabriela Segura’s class struggle with a pair of scissors. They have never used them before. Yet the ability to use scissors is seen as a key sign that a child has the fine-motor skills to grasp a pencil.

Segura would like to start the children on some early reading skills, decoding short words into their component sounds and letters. But several of her students recognize few, if any, letters of the alphabet.

Even in Spanish, many lack basic vocabulary. Some find it hard to concentrate; they are hungry.

But at least at this point, the children are participating, talking, trying. Many have never been in anything resembling a classroom before they enter kindergarten. Some are so stunned by the shift that they do not speak for two or three months, said Principal Maria Mojarro.

Because of the struggles she sees, Mojarro is solidly behind the two-year proposal.

“We are always behind,” she said. “A second year of kindergarten could help many of them get a solid grounding so they are not trying to catch up every year.”

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Times staff writers Jennifer Mena and Daniel Yi contributed to this report.