Full-day kindergarten¬­- for not a penny more

LINCOLN - Next year's full-day kindergarten program will be achieved at no added cost by reallocating salaries from the reading recovery program, Superintendent Georgia Fortunato said at Monday night's special School Committee meeting.

Because the School Department had already budgeted enough to modify classrooms for kindergarten use when they switched from the early learning center model, only the additional salaries were necessary to make full-day K a reality, said Committee Chairwoman Elizabeth Black Robson.

The only other major change needed to implement full-day K will be to cancel the mid-day bus run, which committee member Mary Anne Roll said would save the department $125,000 on transportation costs.

Robson acknowledges saying in January, when the neighborhood model was adopted, that the full-day K program was a "fiscal impossibility."

At the time, said Robson, the School Committee was not willing to consider cutting programs because they believed all were working well.

However, Fortunato later suggested the change in the reading recovery program that works with students who are not reading at age level.

A total of 6.5 positions will be given up, leaving the program with 14 reading teachers, said Fortunato.

Robson said the superintendent and her team spent the last few months examining the program and determined that as long as students have "the gift of time" granted by full-day K, then they will achieve better results than if they had a full reading program but no full-day K.

"It was a full team effort," said Fortunato of her administrative team's analysis of the reading recovery program. "It took hundreds of hours."

The school department currently employes five kindergarten teachers and plans to have eight full-day K classrooms. Teachers will bid for the three available kindergarten teaching positions.

The plan is for Central, Northern, Lonsdale and Saylesville elementary schools to have two full-day K classrooms each and kindergartners will attend their neighborhood school from 9 a.m. to 3:20 p.m.

Fortunato said they anticipate 25 students to be the maximum number of students that the district might have to accommodate in each classroom. Twenty-three is the contractual limit for classroom sizes, said Fortunato, so if the classroom sizes do reach 25 students, the school department will have to pay overages as prescribed by the contract.

Kindergarten enrollment this year was about 200 children.

The kindergarten enrollment estimates are subject to change, said Fortunato, because many parents wait to enroll their children in kindergarten until August. Also there may be a number of parents who choose to return to the Lincoln system instead of private school or the Democracy Prep Blackstone Valley charter school.

If enrollment makes it necessary, Fortunato said, the school department will hire a fourth kindergarten teacher.

"We are trying to be fiscally prudent," said Fortunto. "We don't want a position we don't need."

The remaining salaries left from the reading teachers that were cut will be cost savings, said Fortunato, and will probably go toward things like DPBV tuitions.

For information on registering for Lincoln School's full-day K, call 721-3300 or visit www.lincolnps.org.