School district begins prepping 4-year-olds for workforce

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School district begins prepping 4-year-olds for workforce

July 27, 2015

RACINE, Wis. – Officials in the Wisconsin’s Racine County are preparing 4-year-olds to make sure they’ll be ready to enter the workforce when they’re adults.

Racine Unified School District employees, early childhood experts and members of the Atonement Lutheran Church are working together through a new A.I.M. Now program – an acronym for Achieve, Imagine, and Motivate – to get the county’s youngest students ready for the real world, the Journal Times reports.

“Hopefully that will be a self-sustaining model to get kids to be kindergarten-ready when they enter that phase of their schooling,” Racine County Executive Jonathan Delagrave told the site. “We feel that’s really critical to creating a Racine County-ready workforce.”

The 4K program is the newest idea from the “Higher Expectations for Racine County Youth Program.” And although enrolling students will be about 15 years away from the working world, local officials want to start getting them ready now, at least the best of the lot.

The program relies on funding from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instructionand the state’s child care subsidy program to target specific students: those living in families with a household income of 185 percent or less than the federal poverty threshold that possess good reading skills. The program will run the full day, as opposed to the current half-day 4K program currently offered in Racine’s public schools, according to the Journal Times.

“To get the school up and running, Higher Expectations received a $50,000 contribution from Racine County as well as an undisclosed amount of funding from SC Johnson and Educators Credit Union,” according to the site.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction offers detailed information and research about the purported benefits of 4K, as well as a history of the state’s tug-of-war with the idea. A policy brief posted to the site “explores key developments, starting with the inclusion of education for 4-year-olds in the 1848 Constitution and the establishment of the first private kindergarten in the country in Watertown in 1856, and follows the surge in public education for 4-year-olds in the late 1800s, the decline from 1920o-1970, and the resurgence from 1980-2010,” the DPI site states.

Yet despite Wisconsin’s long history with 4K, the state DPI does not offer any local data on how the practice has impacted students in the long run.

“While it is difficult under Wisconsin’s current assessment system to draw meaningful large-scale conclusions about the impact of 4K programming on children’s development, data from the national SWEEP study as well as data collected by individual districts seem to indicate that four-year-old kindergarten is benefiting the development of participants,” according to the DPI site.

School districts in Eau Claire, Montello, and Wausau have all used some form of 4K program since 2000.

But 4K could soon just become regular kindergarten, because Wisconsin officials are already looking at ways to prepare even younger kids for learning and their college or career.

Higher Expectations executive director Jeff Neubauer told the Journal Times A.I.M Now is also planning a child care program for 3-year-olds that will serve as a feeder program for 4K.

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