10 Schools To Offer Full Day Head Start

Pre-K Program Aims To Help Poor Students

Montgomery schools Superintendent Jerry D. Weast this week announced the expansion of the federal Head Start pre-kindergarten program to full-day study at 10 high-poverty elementary schools, the latest move intended to teach children more at an earlier age and to narrow racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

With the start of classes Monday, 260 4-year-olds will attend full-day pre-kindergarten classes at schools with sufficient poverty to trigger federal Title I aid. The expansion is funded through a $715,000 increase in Title I anti-poverty funds for the 2007-08 academic year.

The county school system has gone from half- to full-day kindergarten at every elementary school, part of a nationwide trend motivated partly by parent convenience and the quest to teach children more reading and math skills at an earlier grade. Full-day kindergarten is mandatory in Maryland this fall and is required in several other states.

That change and others, including class-size reduction in schools most affected by poverty, have paved the way for a more ambitious preschool program. Weast said the extra instructional time is essential, given the increasing academic demands on schoolchildren in recent years.

"We have to change time, not reduce quality," Weast said, speaking Tuesday morning during a news conference at Montgomery Knolls Elementary School in Silver Spring, where Head Start classes will run a full day.

The other nine schools are Arcola, Broad Acres, East Silver Spring, Georgian Forest, Highland, New Hampshire Estates, Twinbrook, Viers Mill and Weller Road.

Head Start, a federal school-readiness program targeted at the poor, is offered alongside the school system's own half-day pre-kindergarten program; together, the preschool programs serve 127 classes of about 20 students each at 58 elementary schools.

Full-day preschool is becoming common in the rest of the nation, particularly in school districts with full-day kindergarten, Pat Ainsworth, spokeswoman for the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, said in an e-mail. Working parents also favor full-day pre-K, she said.

The Rutgers institute reported findings last year from a year-long study that indicated full-day preschool could yield considerable gains. In a comparison of an eight-hour full-day program and a 2.5- to three-hour program, each serving randomly assigned students from the same pool, the study found that full-day students showed nearly twice the reading and math gains as the half-day students after several months of instruction.

"Students in the extended program continued to outperform children in the control group in follow-up testing through the spring of first grade," report authors Kenneth B. Robin, Ellen C. Frede and W. Steven Barnett wrote.

Weast said Montgomery school officials would track student progress in their new full-day program.