Thanks to a new program, Neelyville School is helping its youngest students achieve social and educational milestones before setting foot in kindergarten.
The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is funding the new Missouri Quality Prekindergarten Grants effort for local schools and childcare providers who are licensed or contracted with the DESE Child Care Subsidy program.
According to Neelyville R-IV Superintendent Heather Black, the Neelyville school district was approved in September for the program. It is designed to expand the funding for pre-kindergarten instruction and increase access for low-income families.
“When writing a grant, you have to use a district-approved, specific curriculum that you can follow through with,” Black said. “But the whole purpose is to improve the early learning for students to provide more education opportunities.”
While the program is in the first year of operation at the Hillview Elementary School campus, it currently serves 13 children with one instructor and one paraprofessional.
“We wanted to provide more opportunities for early learning,” Black said. “So we applied and the program is based on the free and reduced lunch programs.”
In September, the school district was awarded a $50,000 grant toward the cost of the program by DESE. Black said the program has been slowly building a pathway for early education.
Belinda Flannigan, the pre-k instructor for the grant-funded classroom, has over 20 years of experience within the field but says this is the first year her class is all 4-year-olds who are ready to enter kindergarten.
“We learn our alphabet or shapes or colors, but it’s also social skills,” Flannigan said. “It’s learning how (to react in situations) and what they expect. They learn to set goals for themselves and they get excited about making those goals. So it’s really about getting excited to learn. They love it.”
Flannigan said the biggest difference for her was the change in the curriculum being more geared toward 4- or 5-year-olds and the pre-kindergarten skills.
“That’s the difference, I think,” Flannigan said during a sit-down interview on the Hillview campus. “A lot of times when you have 3-, 4-, 5-year-olds is that you have to kind of back up and go forward little by little. But your main focus is social skills.”
Black, Flannigan, and Hillcrest principal Patrick Morton all agreed one of the largest benefits of the grant is the ability to serve more students. They said every year they have had to turn people away and have had a waiting list with previous years.
“We were able to get to everybody this year and that was a big positive for us,” Black said. “We want to be able to serve as many students as possible.”
Morton said early education is important because it provides an opportunity to learn social skills along with the pre-kindergarten curriculum and prepares students to be confident once they step into kindergarten.
“Because when you have that precedent when you come in, you are not having to learn all of that and the kindergarten teachers can start right there and move forward rather than stepping back,” he said. “The transition is much easier and much, much smoother.”
Morton also added the confidence level of children who have attended pre-kindergarten is another part of the recipe for success.
“They know what’s expected and they can be successful if they know how to act and what they are supposed to do,” he explained.
“It’s a big deal. I mean with kids that go to kindergarten that have never been to pre-kindergarten, they have to learn how to follow the rules like how to walk in line and that’s a big deal.”
Morton added the base knowledge the pre-kindergarten students take with them is essential.
“It’s not their first rodeo, they have been in a pre-kindergarten program and they have had instruction for a year. That benefits the student more than anybody because they are coming to kindergarten ready to roll,” Morton said.
Black added that since Missouri created the DESE subsidy program, it has opened up opportunities for younger children.
“And that’s exactly what (this program) did for us,” she said. “It allowed us to have more availability to students who would have otherwise not gotten into one of our programs.”