At its Thursday meeting, the Community Consolidated School District 21 Board of Education unanimously adopted a plan to bring full-day kindergarten to the school district beginning next school year.
“Bringing full-day kindergarten to CCSD21 has been a long time coming,” said Phil Pritzker, President of the CCSD21 Board of Education. “We know this is a tremendous opportunity for our students and establishes an even stronger foundation for their future success, and we’re thrilled to offer full-day kindergarten programming districtwide. This decision reflects the third major desire strongly expressed by our community during the recent districtwide community engagement process that included air conditioning and security enhancements that were completed this past summer.”
Parent and community input through CCSD21’s Design21 community engagement effort in the 2017-2018 school year formally identified districtwide full-day kindergarten as a priority. In October 2018, the Board of Education directed the CCSD21 administration to develop a comprehensive implementation plan for districtwide full-day kindergarten for its consideration.
The implementation plan outlined key benefits of a full-day kindergarten program. In a full-day program, draft schedules show students could have more than eight hours of literacy instruction per week, compared to the current half-day program where students receive approximately five hours of literacy instruction per week. Likewise, students would see significant increases in time dedicated to math, science, social studies, and the development of social-emotional skills through both direct lessons and embedded teaching. Children would also have additional time for special areas like PE, music, and art.
“We know that children who participate in a full-day kindergarten program show increased rates of academic and social emotional growth during their elementary school experience and that those benefits last into the middle school and high school levels,” said Dr. Michael Connolly, Superintendent of CCSD21. “We are very excited to be able to bring this opportunity to the entire CCSD21 community. This of course would not have been possible without the overwhelming community support we received in our recent referendum and we are extremely thankful for that.”
CCSD21’s successful November 2018 referendum provided funds to prepare physical spaces for full-day kindergarten. Site work to prepare schools for full-day kindergarten will be completed in summer 2020.
Registration for the 2020-2021 school year will begin in spring 2020. More information will be available at www.ccsd21.org as the date approaches.
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