Boyertown School Board mulls full-day kindergarten

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DOUGLASS (Mont.) — As the Boyertown Area School District begins the process of preparing its budget for the 2025-26 school year, it has put an aspirational goal in front of the school board — implementing full-day kindergarten.

The budget review was presented on Nov. 12 at Gilbertsville Elementary School by Patricia Denicola, the district's business manager, who gave an overview of the district's debts, capital expenses, property assessments and the state-imposed tax hike cap of 4.8 percent.

She recommended the board adopt a resolution at the Nov. 26 meeting pledging to keep any tax hike in the upcoming budget at or below the state index of 4.8 percent.

The final budget adoption is not scheduled to take place until June 25, 2025.

But the item that generated the most board discussion was a proposal to move Boyertown from a half-day to a full-day kindergarten model.

"We would like to investigate, expanding kindergarten to a full-day program," she said. She stressed that if the board is on board with the idea, it would not take place in the 2025-2026 school year, but in the school year that follows.

The district has 19 half-day sections now which require 9.5 teachers, so enacting a full-day program would require twice as many teachers, a cost of about $1.04 million.

Further, if there is not enough classroom space available, the district might have to consider using modular classrooms to get the program started, Denicola said.

"The foundation of kids and what they come to us in the early stages of their development is critical to educate them," said acting Superintendent Michael Stoudt. Boyertown is the only school district in Berks County "that does not have full-day K so I think that's important for us to look at, and look at the data of the pre-K kids who come to us from an all-day program that come into our half-day program, it's somewhat of a drop-off," he said.

Board member James Brophy would like to see that data.

"I'm not necessarily opposed to this, but I would like some sort of presentation to the board that shows the gains; what are we going to get out of this? I'm not against this, but until I get some data, I'm not for it. What is the empirical data that supports a full-day kindergarten? Bring that to us so we can make an informed decision about how much full-day kindergarten will enhance the educational abilities of our students."

Board member Marianne Scott said that although she is not opposed to full-day kindergarten, she would like to see the district focus first on making class sizes smaller in the early grades.

"I have concerns," said board member Christine Neiman. "We're talking security and yet we're considering putting modular class space out there? How's that going to be secured? We did that before. There's no security, so that's a big, big concern."

"And the classroom space. We're saying we don't have space now," Neiman continued, "and if we're talking about making class size smaller, how are we going to have the space? I don't think we should be putting a lot of our staff's time into it when they could be doing other things, especially trying to get our grades up for our students."

Stoudt said Neiman's questions are valid "but I don't think we should put them up as a barrier to start investigating this so we can make the decision based on what resources we have available."

One advantage, Stoudt said, is that full-day kindergarten would "eliminate that midday bus run."

Board member Wendy Kratz spoke in favor of returning foreign language classes to the district's middle school students.