Kindergarten Age Bill Dies in Committee
A proposal to rakse the minimum age for children to start kindergarten--a move that would have delayed the start of public school for almost 10,000 students--has failed to win approval from the legislature's Education Committee.
"We would have been shutting thousands of children out of school, and that's not acceptable for me," said Rep. Andy Fleischmann, D-West Hartford and co-chairman of the committee.
The State Board of Education backed the change, agreeing with state education officials that the current wide disparity in kindergarten ages --which ranges from 4 and-a-half to 7 years old--makes it difficult for teachers to meet the needs of all the children in the classroom.
The Education Committee did vote to close the gap at the end of the range, unanimously approving a bill to require parents to enroll their children if they will turn 6 during the school year, thus keeping 7-year-olds out of kindergarten.
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Kindergarten age bill
I applaud the stopping of bill 930. My primary concern with the proposed changes was that "younger" children who were ready to move on would have been denied access to kindergarten. I am troubled that a major reason for killing this bill is that kids shouldn't be denied access to kindergarten if they had no place else to go. Even if a child had access to preschool, that child should not be expected to remain in a preschool environment if he or she is ready to start kindergarten. There has to be a cutoff somewhere, but I think the state currently has is right. It accomodates the range at which children mature.
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