“If lower income students who cannot afford to pay for an extra year of preschool enter kindergarten on time, while students whose families have the resources to attend another year of preschool are held out, the result is a wide disparity in age and experience for children in kindergarten classrooms. “Having a consistent age span allows districts to establish curricular and instructional practices that are age-appropirate,” reads the state report. In making its recommendation to narrow who is eligible for kindergarten, the Office of Early Childhood highlights its concerns that a wide disparity in age could make it difficult for kindergarten teachers to properly educate all of their students. Salem has one of the highest rates among Connecticut districts of parents opting to wait a year to enroll their children in kindergarten, state data from the 2014-15 school year show. “It seemed like it would be fine, but she was often at different stages than her peers,” said Munro of her daughter, who is now in her mid-20s. Munro elected to send her daughter to school the first year she was eligible, a decision she said meant her daughter was regularly the youngest among her friends and classmates. “Many of them were not developmentally ready for kindergarten so we were always playing catch-up,” she recollected of her tenure as a teacher in one of the state’s poorest communities. Munro is a retired kindergarten teacher in Windham, a member of the Salem Board of Education and the mother of a so-called “ber baby” - a term that refers to children born from September through December and whose parents typically face this decision. Pamela Munro has seen what sending a child to school early or late means. I’ve literally seen kids at the Board of Education meetings trying to make the case on why they should be able to go to school early,” said Merrill Gay, a member of New Britain’s school board and executive director of the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance, which represents daycare providers. “Everybody wants to send their kids early here. In New Britain, where the average household income is the second lowest in the state, just one in 40 kindergarten students waited a year to enroll in kindergarten.
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