Transitional kindergarten program finishes first semester with positive reviews

Dec. 29—As it wraps up its first full semester, the Joplin School District's transition kindergarten program seems to be delivering on its promises to be "a bridge for children who need the gift of time and experience in order to reach their full potential," according to parents.

That was one of four reasons given for the program, and Paula Hurl, parent of Marshall Hurl, 5, a student in the transitional kindergarten class at Irving Elementary, said she sees good progress from her son.

"I think it's going really well," Hurl said. "I think the smaller class environment is definitely a huge benefit. He can spend more one-on-one time with the teacher, and when he first started he could write his 'M' but he couldn't write the rest of his name. Now he's writing his name, he knows his numbers like he should, and he's really benefiting from the class. And the teacher is amazing."

Filling a gapMarshall Hurl's teacher at Irving is Erica Doennig, who also helped develop the new program to fill a gap she and other regular kindergarten teachers said they were seeing in more and more of their students. The new program gives students an extra year, or a transition year before entering kindergarten.

"We've been noticing over time that kids are coming to kindergarten less and less prepared," Doennig said. "About six years ago, I started saying maybe this would be a program worth looking into, and I would bring it up occasionally to my principal or the assistant superintendent if I was speaking to her. Finally, they said, 'OK, we're going to do this.' I spent the last two years researching, doing site visits with other schools in the area, and this last year we decided we were going to go for it."

Doennig said some younger kindergartners — students born in May, June and July, closer to the district's July 31 cutoff date when children had to be 5 years old to enter kindergarten — were lacking some behavioral or relationship skills, or fine motor skills needed for regular kindergarten, a class that has become much more rigorous in recent years.

She said every child in the district undergoes kindergarten screening to look for fine motor skills, behavioral and emotional development, and other factors that would help a child be ready for kindergarten.

Doennig said teachers used those results to identify students who could benefit from the transitional kindergarten program.

"I have some in here that have had no experience outside the home," Doennig said. "We have some that are in here for behaviors — they need to work on their behaviors and social skills — and then we have some that are a combination of both. They're just young and their parents wanted to give them an extra year. These kids could technically have gone to kindergarten. It was a parent decision. We called and said, 'We think your child would be a good fit for the program.'"

Shanon Cooper, Transitional Kindergarten teacher at Cecil Floyd Elementary, said regular kindergarten is more rigorous than some people realize and the transitional kindergarten class is a chance to give a child a leg up when pushing them into regular kindergarten early could leave them frustrated and falling behind.

"I've taught kindergarten for 10 years and I've been teaching for 20 years," Cooper said. "There's always been a noticeable gap between children that come in who have just turned 5 and children who are already 6 or ready to turn 6. That's a huge year of maturing and developing but they're all thrown in one class together. Also, there could be up to 25 of them and so you kind of have to keep everyone kind of together and those littler ones can kind of get lost in the pace of kindergarten."

Cooper said she loves teaching the transitional kindergarten class because it has fewer children and teaches basic skills at a slower pace using play-based learning.

"I think this year, because it was new and a lot of parents thought it was remedial and thought it was because of behavior, they may have thought it was holding their child back," Cooper said. "I think that's what we're trying to prevent. So the criteria, they have to be just turning 5. So even if a kid met our criteria but they're getting ready to turn 6, we don't want them to be so old when they graduate. These parents I talked to, they weren't sure they even wanted to send their child to kindergarten yet because a child doesn't have to be in school until they're 6 and they had just turned 5."

Grading the program

When asked how she would grade the program after its first semester, Cooper gave it "an A+++."

"I think overwhelmingly us three teachers will stay with the program," Cooper said. "It'll be a program that stays, and I hope it builds because I really feel like almost every school could benefit from a TK."

Student Marshall Hurl said he likes his class because "we get to play and make stuff and learn stuff."

Paula Hurl said it's giving her son the boost he needs to be a better student next year.

"It's going to give him just that little extra boost he needed for kindergarten," she said. "Honestly, I don't know if we would have sent him to kindergarten this year. That was part of our thought process, I'd rather do this now than wait until third grade when he's fallen behind and have to hold him back after he's already made all of his friends and everything."

Meghan Bossman's son, Clive, is a student in Cooper's class and she said he's also benefitting from transitional kindergarten.

"Clive is excited to go to school every day," Bossman said. "It's a small class, so he knows all of his classmates. He has made friends easily because it's such a small group. They all seem pretty close. He's excited to go each day, he's excited to share what they're learning. Which hasn't always been the case, but he wants to talk about what they're learning. He's starting to understand reading and writing, which is huge. He's grown leaps and bounds even in this first semester. He's learned so much and he's really excited about it."

Learn more The Joplin School District started transitional kindergarten classes under its program for Success, Opportunities and Accelerated Readiness, or SOAR. There are three transitional kindergarten classes in the district, one taught by Erica Doennig at Irving Elementary, one taught by Shanon Cooper at Cecil Floyd Elementary and one taught by Laura Cooper at Eastmorland Elementary school. Two of the classes have 10 students and one has 11 students. For more details about the program, go to https://www.joplinschools.org/parents_and_students/s_o_a_r_transitional_kindergarten.