Trends: More Tri-City kindergartners well-prepared to start school

It’s a sad truism in education that not all children arrive equally prepared to start kindergarten.

Happily, Tri-City kids are reporting to kindergarten in the fall with increasingly well-rounded skill sets. So says the latest report from Benton-Franklin Trends, which took a hard look at results of the newish Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills or WaKIDS.

To back up, kids who start their eduction careers with below-age emotional, physical or other skills usually struggle to catch up — and keep up — with their peers. Preparing kids for school and supporting them when they’re there pays big dividends later on in better grades and better graduation rates.

So goes the reasoning behind the Washington Legislature’s efforts to support early education initiatives. The $51 million state grant to Kennewick to build the equivalent of 89 classrooms to decrease class sizes is a prime example.

WaKIDS is a passive evaluation by kindergarten teachers that measures the social/emotional, physical, language, cognitive, literacy and match skills of their newly arrived pupils in the fall. The assessment is made in state-funded schools with all-day kindergarten. That means not all kids are assessed, but many are.

Locally and statewide, incoming kindergartners showed great strides in four or more areas in the 2015-16 school year compared with their peers three years earlier.

For Benton and Franklin county schools, nearly 69 percent of all incoming kindergartners were proficient in four or more areas at the start the past school year. That’s almost half again more than the 41 percent who met the mark in the 2011-12 school year.

Statewide, almost 76 percent of kindergartners were proficient in four or more areas in 2015-16, compared with 72 percent three years earlier.

Benton-Franklin Trends is an initiative to measure the educational, financial and civic life of the Tri-Cities by the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Analysis at Eastern Washington University. It publishes new reports based on state and federal data each week.

View it at bit.ly/BFTrends.

For more information about WaKIDS results, including individual district and school results, go to bit.ly/WaKIDReport.

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 2:54 PM with the headline "Trends: More Tri-City kindergartners well-prepared to start school."