(Source: MIRS.news, Published 03/12/2024) If a child is at least five years old, their parents or legal guardians would be required to send them to kindergarten under legislation being spearheaded by Senate Education Chair Dayna Polehanki (D-Livonia).
Currently in Michigan, enrollment in kindergarten is not mandatory. A child must begin school in the upcoming 2024-25 school year if they turn 6 before Dec. 1. If they reach 6 years old after Dec. 1, they will need to be enrolled for the following academic year.
According to the Michigan Department of Education (MDE), a 6-year-old who didn't receive kindergarten learning could kick off their education in the first grade "regardless of readiness."
"Students in Michigan are not required to enroll in school until the first grade, and I think that is a missed opportunity in terms of young kids' academic achievement," said Polehanki to her Senate Education Committee Tuesday afternoon. "I'll bet that many Michiganders don't realize that kindergarten isn't mandatory in our state. I didn't know this until coming to the Legislature, but it's true."
She said because the state is moving toward universal preschool, which is one of the top ambitions among the state's Democratic leaders, "it doesn't make sense that kids skip kindergarten."
Through Polehanki's SB 285, every school district and public school academy (PSA) offering first grade would be mandated to provide kindergarten.
If a youth turns 5 years old on or before Sept. 1, they must be enrolled for the school year "that begins in the calendar year in which the child's fifth birthday occurs." If the child reaches 5 years old after Sept. 1, they must begin in the following academic year.
Polehanki clarified that her legislation would take effect for the 2025-26 school year and exemptions would continue to exist for parents' enrolling their children in home school or private programs. She also highlighted that the ability to choose between full-day or half-day kindergarten programs would still be retained at the local level.
States that have been requiring kindergarten attendance as of 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, include Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
One of the speakers during today's Senate committee meeting was Superintendent Nikolai VITTI of Detroit Public Schools Community District.
When it came to assessments for third through eighth graders in the DPSCD, the district commemorated in August 2023 that proficiency levels in M-STEP English Language Arts and PSAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing grew to 14.6 percent in the 2022-23 academic year.
The latest levels represented improvements from 12.6 percent in the 2021-22 school year, and from the 14.4 percent that occurred before the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2018-19 academic year.
Although the DPSCD views the aforementioned numbers as "strong improvement" being seen, Vitti said their "No. 1 challenge" in expanding student achievement is student attendance.
"This is one of the main reasons why we support this bill. In DPSCD, when we looked at our kindergartners last year, 70 percent of our kindergartners were chronically absent. That means that they missed more than 18 days," Vitti said. "Interestingly enough, when you look at last year's data at the first, second and third grade levels, the chronic absenteeism numbers drop. We believe one reason for that is that kindergarten is not mandatory from an attendance point of view."
When it came to first-graders within the DPSCD, 64 percent of students were chronically absent. The share of chronically absent students in the second and third grades were 62 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
"We want to start as early as possible, creating a culture and expectation that school is important every day, with the exemption of extreme illnesses (and) death in a family," Vitti said. "Students should be attending every day because we are doing much better as a district. We are nearly fully staffed. We move at and above grade level curricula . . . We are showing dividends in student achievement. We just need our students to attend more regularly."
In the Governor's budget recommendations for Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, the state's executive branch calls for a $159.5 million appropriation to continue expanding the Great Start Readiness Program (GSRP). The program currently delivers free pre-K programs to 4-year-olds from households residing at or below 300 percent of the federal poverty level.
But through the Governor's proposal, income requirements would be removed, $63.5 million from the appropriation would be used to cover an estimated 6,800 youths through the program, and $35 million would be spent on opening new pre-K classrooms in "underserved areas."
In the 2021-22 school year, 36,415 children were served by the GSRP.
"I think the Governor and this Legislature (have) done a great job of expanding Pre-K, and a way to strengthen Pre-K is to better ensure that students are attending in kindergarten, or we're going to lose the momentum that we're going to create," Vetti said.
The Senate Education Committee only heard testimony on Polehanki's
SB 285. Legislation making kindergarten attendance mandatory for 5-year-olds was introduced in January 2019 by former Rep. William Sowerby, a Clinton Township Democrat. However, the bill did not progress beyond a referral to the then-Republican-led House Education Committee.
