After years of discussion and planning, district officials are discussion what the full-day program will look like in the fall of 2019.
In a little more than six months, kindergarten students in Cherry Hill Public Schools will become the first in the district to attend class for a full day.
After years of discussion and planning, full-day kindergarten is coming to Cherry Hill for the 2019–2020 school year, and district officials are in the beginning stages of implementing the program. The district held information sessions on the new program in the last two weeks of February ahead of the opening of kindergarten registration on March 1.
Director of Curriculum Farrah Mahan gave a presentation to parents during the first information session held last Tuesday at the Malberg Administration Building. The presentation highlighted the changes the district is making with the kindergarten curriculum and a timeline for how the new program is being rolled out.
A full-day kindergarten committee consisting of administration, teachers and parents with a wide range of expertise has been working on plans for the program for more than a year. Mahan explained the committee received feedback from the community and incorporated much of the feedback into the program’s plans.
Parents will have the opportunity to register their students for full-day kindergarten at all 12 elementary schools. This is a big change from an informal proposal district officials discussed briefly in 2017 to change two elementary schools into kindergarten centers. Mahan said the district decided to place full-day kindergarten in all 12 elementary schools in response to the community’s desire to keep the 12 elementary schools as neighborhood, kindergarten to fifth-grade buildings.
“During that process, people from the community just told us, we want to be in our home schools, we want our students to be with their neighborhood friends,” Mahan said during last Tuesday’s presentation.
Mahan added the district will have enough space across all 12 buildings to house full-day kindergarten, even if the district were to have a large number of students sign up.
“We have accounted for space in the respective buildings,” Mahan said.
The biggest change will be the addition of new staff members to teach the full-day classes. The district is waiting to see how many students are registered for next year before deciding on the number of new staff members, but Mahan estimated the district would likely need to create 10 to 15 new positions. The new positions will be included in the 2019–20 budget and will be posted following the close of kindergarten registration in mid-March.
With the change to full-day kindergarten, district officials decided to revamp its kindergarten curriculum. The biggest change is the introduction of what the district is calling integrated curriculum. The curriculum will include three units, named “our community,” “our diverse world” and “construction.” Within those themes, students will explore science and social studies lessons through English/Language Arts tasks. An explanation of the curriculum from the district states, “ELA tasks, including reading texts, formulating arguments, constructing explanations and defending claims, are made achievable when they are a path to understanding something students really want to know.”
Mahan said the district is integrating science and social studies into English Language Arts so the students will be learning about those subjects as they are working on their literacy skills.
“The literature they’re reading may have a science theme to it or a social studies theme to it,” Mahan said.
The integrated curriculum also helps to free up more time for play and social-based activities to be included in the school day. One important aspect of the full-day program is the ability for students to have extended time to play during the school day. Part of the kindergarten information sessions included a sample schedule showing how much time would be allocated to classroom work each day. The sample schedule included about four hours of instruction, which Mahan noted isn’t much different than the amount of instruction in the current half-day program. The sample schedule included 55 minutes for lunch and recess, an additional 25 minutes for playtime, 15 minutes for rest and quiet time and 10 minutes for snack time. Mahan said many members in the community were adamant about putting a significant amount of playtime into the kindergarten schedule.
“We didn’t say ‘OK, we have a full day, now we’re going to fill it with two hours of academics,’” Mahan said. “We filled it with play and encores and lunch and recess and snack time. It allows for a more comprehensive day.”
Registration for full-day kindergarten begins on Friday, March 1 and continues through Thursday, March 14. Children must be 5 years old on or before Oct. 1 to register for kindergarten. Students currently enrolled in the school district, including students in the Barclay Early Childhood Center, do not need to re-register.
Each of the 12 schools will have registration on a different date. Parents are also asked to arrive at specific times depending on their last name. A full list of registration dates and times is available at www.chclc.org.
Two final information sessions on full-day kindergarten will take place Wednesday, Feb. 27 at 7 p.m. at the Malberg Administration Building and Thursday, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. at the Katz JCC. The presentation is open to all parents interested in the full-day program. The district will also be posting its slideshow presentation from the information sessions on its website following the last session on Feb. 28.
