School starts next week, but one in four Hamilton County kindergartners likely won’t be ready, a new report says.

Compiling national data and local numbers, researchers at the Chattanooga-based Community Research Council and a 19-member advisory board took an in-depth look at what makes a student ready to start school, how many local children are prepared for kindergarten and how to help those who aren’t. Their findings are in a report released today.

“This educates the community about the importance of early childhood education. I don’t think everyone knows what’s at stake. It’s not just about the children, it’s about the entire community,” said Dr. Eileen Robertson-Rehberg, senior policy analyst for the council and one of the primary authors of “School Readiness and Early Grade Success in Hamilton County.”

Most children grow up with some exposure to books in their home and have parents who engage with them before they are school-aged, the report says. But there remains a population in Hamilton County — roughly 1,000 children each year — who enter school without this advantage, and they are most likely to fail in the early grades, according to the report.

These children often have parents who are very poor or have little education themselves, the researchers say. Many also are victims of abuse or neglect, have only one parent in the household, have limited English language proficiency or are born to teenage mothers, the report finds. In addition, some of these children also may have a disability of some kind, the report states.

Children with the highest percentages of these risk factors — those who most need early childhood programs such as prekindergarten or Head Start, according to the researchers — are concentrated in the inner city areas of Chattanooga.

Although 87 percent of at-risk children in Hamilton County receive some kind of early childhood intervention, 13 percent are not served by any type of subsidized child-care program, the report states.

Phil Acord, president and CEO of Children’s Home and a member of the report’s advisory board, said he expected the number of children not served by some kind of intervention to be higher. Still, the more than 600 at-risk students receiving no aid in Hamilton County must be helped, Mr. Acord said.

“The message to the community is, ‘How can we produce the services necessary to make sure all children have access to early childhood education and have the tools necessary to start school?’” he said. “I hope that’s the battle cry, the obvious objective.”

Mr. Acord said he was hopeful that Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen’s efforts to grow the statewide prekindergarten program would eventually prove successful and serve more students than it has in the past.

“Hopefully, people who have the opportunity to expand public services read this (report),” he said. “I know these people are all on tight budgets, but at some point you have to prioritize and say, ‘How can I get the best return for my dollar?’”

Although the goal is to enroll as many at-risk children as possible in some kind of intervention program, there currently is no way to measure whether those efforts prove worthwhile, said David Eichenthal, president of the Community Research Council.

The report recommends partnering the early intervention programs with the Hamilton County school system — where most of the at-risk students are enrolled — to keep tabs on whether local efforts are successful in raising the students’ academic achievement.

“There really isn’t a good way to track kids who get these programs and see how they do once they enter the public school system,” he said. “We are trying to figure out which programs work best for most kids.”