Kindergarten enrollment is way down in WA. What does it mean for kids and families?
The children struggle to mute and un-mute their microphones.
Squirming at kitchen tables and makeshift desks, their small voices occasionally squeak through laptop speakers, asking the teacher — who long ago established herself as a saint and a zen master — why the feed is glitching or how come they can’t see the lesson on the screen.
It’s kindergarten — remotely — in the age of COVID-19.
For many Washington families — including mine — it’s also an unfortunate concession of the 2020 school year.
With public schools across the state forgoing in-person instruction to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus, distance learning is the imperfect option we’re left with.
By some, like our middle schooler, this new way of life has been embraced. If the rest of her schooling transpires via the magic of the internet and a glowing screen, she swears she’ll be fine.
For others — particularly families with young children old enough to enter kindergarten in the throes of a pandemic — it’s a situation that’s far less than ideal, even under the best of circumstances at home.
As numbers released by the state Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction earlier this month illustrate, this reality has created a considerable conundrum for many families.
Across Washington, September 2020 enrollment data shows a 2.82% decrease in the number of students in the state’s public K-12 schools.
For kindergarten, the trend is starkest of all.
Enrollment data shows a third of the overall decrease in enrollment is “attributed to kindergarten-age children not enrolling or delaying their kindergarten start,” according to OSPI.
That’s a loss of more than 11,000 students.
Overall, compared to 2019, kindergarten enrollment is down 14%.
Developmentally inappropriate
The data, according to Kristen Missall, a professor at the University of Washington College of Education and the director of UW’s School Psychology Program, suggests that parents are asking legitimate questions in a time of immense uncertainty.
Is remote kindergarten worth it, parents wonder?
Or would their child be better off in another setting or even sitting out the 2020 school year and trying this whole public education thing next fall?
Even in non-pandemic times, parents in Washington have the option of waiting to enroll their children in public schools, Missall said. Washington law doesn’t require kids to enroll in school until age 8.
For many children, it might be beneficial to delay the start of kindergarten, Missall added, describing it as a question she’s frequently asked.
Age alone, Missall said, is an imperfect gauge for a child’s readiness for school. There are a number of reasons — both educationally and socially and emotionally — why delaying the start of kindergarten might make sense for a child, as well as some challenges it might present in the future.
Throw in a pandemic and the limitations of remote learning for young students, and it’s only natural for more families to choose delaying the start of kindergarten, according to Missall.
Meredith Honig, a professor of education policy, organization and leadership at the University of Washington in Seattle, described remote or online learning as a poor substitute for what happens in the classroom.
With this in mind, Honig said she understands why an increased number of families are choosing to delay the start of kindergarten or attempting to find other options, like private schools.
“When you see those little guys using their two fingers to type stuff, it’s just heartbreaking. It’s very hard to recreate kindergarten online,” Honig said.
Specifically, Honig highlighted the social and emotional development and important hands-on learning that occurs in the classroom under normal circumstances.
Online, all of that is out the window, she said.
“It’s developmentally inappropriate for kindergarten-age kids to sit still in the ways that online learning ... demands,” Honig said. “So for some families, this might have been an appropriate time for them to really ask themselves if this is the right time for my child (to start kindergarten) … given how they’ve been developing.”
While Honig was careful not to paint a rosy picture — describing the fact that public schools are unable to open for in-person learning as “an incredible, utter public health failure by the federal government” — she also cautioned about the risk of jumping to conclusions about the negative impact remote learning will have on a generation of students.
Even if they’re not enrolled in kindergarten, some children are likely in “learning-rich environments” elsewhere, Honig said, and when in-person learning eventually returns, it will be important to take this into consideration.
Honig said it will also be important for educators to avoid making broad assumptions about how remote learning has impacted students’ readiness based on factors like race or class, advocating instead for a more personalized, individual assessment.
“It’s a very narrow view to assume kids aren’t learning because they’re not in a formal classroom,” Honig said.
The challenges ahead
According to early learning specialist Kristie Kauerz, who directs the National P-3 Center out of the University of Colorado Denver, lower kindergarten enrollment numbers raise “several categories of concern” for students, families and school districts.
The most obvious, Kauerz said, is where the kids who would normally be enrolled in public kindergarten have gone.
Some have likely transitioned to private schools, while others might be home-schooled or participating in an independent learning pod organized by parents, sometimes with the assistance of a hired tutor.
Still more, Kauerz said, are likely at home under the care of a parent or relative, or in a child care setting.
Collecting this data will help districts make important decisions about student placement whenever schools re-open, Kauerz said.
Broadly speaking, Kauerz said, these are the questions districts across the country should be asking:
“They’re not in school. So where are they? And what kinds of experiences are they having or not having right now?”
Looking toward the 2021 school year and hopefully a full return to in-person learning, districts face a number of new, unprecedented challenges, Kauerz said.
First and foremost will be the likelihood of “a much bigger kindergarten cohort” with a wider age range than normal.
Since kindergarten in Washington isn’t mandatory, it also might mean more students will skip kindergarten altogether and go straight to first grade, Kauerz said.
“That has implications ... for the composition of the classroom,” she noted.
Next year, “a kindergarten teacher could have kids who range in age all the way over six,” Kauerz described, while there likely will be some children “entering first grade without all the learning and development that kindergarten provides to students.”
Finally, the way in which the state typically funds school districts will compound and complicate all of these obstacles, Kauerz said.
While the educational disparities that are being created and exacerbated by the move to remote learning are of utmost concern, Kauerz said, those working in early education and childhood development are “really nervous about the legislative fights ahead.”
As OSPI highlighted this week, public schools in Washington are funded “through the Prototypical School Funding Model.”
This model uses enrollment numbers to determine “how much funding each school will be provided in order to pay for staffing, materials and supplies,” OSPI noted.
So what happens when enrollment numbers drop precipitously while the challenges of providing a basic education during the 2021 school year — including the potential for larger kindergarten class sizes and a need for more space and teachers — continue to mount?
And what happens to school funding and early learning programs if the state Legislatures feels the pinch of COVID-19-related budget shortfalls and comes looking for money to save?
They’re scenarios we should be paying close attention to, Kauerz said.
Responding to the current crisis will require flexibility and forward thinking from lawmakers, she argued, because a funding cut now likely will have serious repercussions in years to come.
“There are short-term solutions that might recognize that attendance and enrollment are bad measures” this year, Kauerz said. “We need to continually impress on our legislators and other elected officials the importance of early childhood programs. They’re not just safe babysitting experiences. They’re really laying the foundation for long-term academic and social success.”
“It’s a values statement,” Kauerz contended.
“There will be really hard decisions that make sense in the near term, but we need to make sure we’re being thoughtful about what the ramifications will be in the long term.”
This story was originally published October 10, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
