A new era will begin for Mt. Laurel Schools when the doors open for the first day of class on Thursday, Sept. 5.
For the first time ever, Mt. Laurel Schools will have full-day kindergarten during the 2019-20 school year. However, the changes in the kindergarten program will go beyond just adding hours to the school day. Superintendent George Rafferty said the program includes a modern curriculum focused on creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and communication.
“What we were intentional about not doing was pushing down higher level grade work into kindergarten and making the child’s first experience in school highly academic,” Rafferty said. “Many of the children developmentally are not ready for that kind of enhanced academic environment. They more have to focus on the social, emotional development of a child and developing a lot of the pre-academic knowledge that they need as a basis to do that higher grade level work.”
A significant portion of the kindergarten school day will be devoted to free-choice centers. Several free-choice centers will be set up in each classroom, each featuring a different activity. Students will be able to rotate among the centers and choose which centers they’d like to explore.
All of the free-choice centers contain activities with creative education tasks allowing students to better develop social, critical thinking and teamwork skills. All different subject areas will be featured in the center. Some examples include an art center with a drawing or painting activity, a math center featuring a number or measurement game, a dramatic play center and a literacy area where students will be tasked to spell words using letters that they find.
“The idea is that children, at an early age, learn best through exploring in a creative environment, engaging with each other socially, that’s how they develop language, that’s how they develop socially,” Rafferty said.
“The kind of thing we don’t want to do is show them pictures of what they should be doing,” Rafferty later added. “We want them to create and innovate.”
Focusing on a child’s skill development is a crucial part of the kindergarten program. Rather than having a typical report card in kindergarten, Mt. Laurel is using an assessment tool called GOLD. GOLD focuses more on a child’s strengths and developmental milestones instead of assigning letter grades in subject areas.
“It’s based on developmental milestones, what children are expected to be able to do at certain developmental milestones with the use of language, with their social skills, with their thinking and problem-solving skills,” Rafferty said.
The addition of full-day kindergarten means there will be more kindergarten teachers across the district this year. The district will have 21 kindergarten classes across the six schools. There will be a teacher for each class plus one support staff in each of the six buildings for a total of 27 full-day kindergarten staff members. All of the staff members have gone through hours of professional development to prepare for this school year.
Mt. Laurel Schools has seen a spike in enrollment with the addition of full-day kindergarten. As of mid-August, 417 students had enrolled in the kindergarten across all six schools combined.
“We have noticed, compared to last year, a 23 to 25 percent increase in enrollment,” Rafferty said. “That’s how many more students we have enrolled now compared to what we were serving in our half-day program.”
The district has enough space and staff to accommodate the additional students, with Rafferty saying the number of students aligns with what the district projected through a recent demographic study it conducted.
Full-day kindergarten will be included in all six elementary schools. To achieve this, new kindergarten rooms were added at Fleetwood and Larchmont elementary schools. In addition, alterations were made at Hillside and Parkway schools to convert space into kindergarten rooms at those buildings.
Parents looking for information on full-day kindergarten can visit a page dedicated to the program on the school district’s website, www.mtlaurelschools.org/Full-Day-Kindergarten/index.html.
The additional kindergarten classrooms were just a couple of the many projects taking place district-wide this summer. After voters approved Mt. Laurel Schools’ bond referendum last fall, the district was tasked with completing a lot of work over the summer. Projects at some of the schools included HVAC replacement, new LED lighting, fire alarm replacement, and roof replacement. Despite the intensity of some of the projects, Rafferty said all of the major work is scheduled for completion prior to the start of the school year and all of the district’s schools will open on time.
“Our additional (rooms) will be ready,” Rafferty said. “Our internal classroom work that needs to be done will be completed. Our fire alarms, our security upgrades are completed. All of the electrical work is completed.”
There are no major changes to the school calendar this year compared to last. The only change the district made was to reduce the number of half-days for students.
“It’s an area that puts a certain burden on families in the community when students go to school and only have a half-day,” Rafferty said. “We had been doing some professional development with teachers, we created half-days for the specific purpose of professional development. We do have in-service days in the district where schools close and we can do professional development. It just didn’t seem it was worth disrupting the community to that extent.”
Residents can view the school year calendar at www.mtlaurelschools.org.
Other changes are ones taking place across the state following new mandates from the state Department of Education. Students in grades six through eight will be taking a course on financial literacy this year. Additionally, a new mandate requiring schools to have 20 minutes of recess per day through grade five means Hartford School will now have recess for both grades five through six.
There will be numerous events throughout the year as well, with perhaps the biggest celebration coming to Harrington Middle School as it will celebrate its 50th anniversary. The school will hold events to celebrate the anniversary and will be releasing more details in the near future.
