Rebecca Fulgham
David Kelley

Starting school at the kindergarten level is so out, area educators said. Prekindergarten is the new kindergarten.

“Pre-k is today what kindergarten was 40 years ago,” said David Kelley, director of the Southeast Tennessee Head Start program and pre-k programs for Cleveland city and Bradley County schools. “There is a nationwide drive toward pre-k.”

Throughout the region, most early education programs are on the same timetable as public schools and will begin in coming weeks.

In addition to formal pre-k, early education options include home-school instruction, daycare facilities and state or federally funded programs, such as Head Start.

Experts, educators and parents said no matter the method, the benefits are nearly priceless.

The claim of benefits is backed by research such as the High/Scope Perry Preschool study, which evaluated the effects of a high-quality early education over four decades.

Judy Graham, director of Sequatchie Valley Head Start and Child Care Service, said the early years are so important to learning that parents should focus on getting their child into the best-fitting early education program, instead of saving for college.

She said parents should think about it.

“Their child came into this world, and less than two years later, they are speaking a complex language and doing complex tasks. It is just amazing what goes on in these early months,” Mrs. Graham said.

options

Head Start for decades has been giving that early instruction to children, often those who otherwise might not have had the opportunity, said Rebecca Fulgham, director of the Family Resource Agency of North Georgia.

But the program is often misunderstood, she said.

“Most people think it is child care,” Ms. Fulgham said. “Head Start is a school readiness program.”

In some cases across the region, Head Start differs from pre-k because it focuses on the whole family and gives preference to those most at risk, officials said. Typically, Head Start programs also provide other services such as health checkups for children.

After looking at her options, South Pittsburg, Tenn., resident Meegan Burton sent both of her children to Kids Bank Learning Center, a nonprofit educational day-care facility initiated by Mrs. Graham.

While Mrs. Burton was happy with the program she chose, she said finding the right fit was difficult.

She said some are “baby-sitting-type care, and don’t teach the kids anything.”

In general, prekindergarten refers to a state-funded, five-day-a-week school program.

In 1995, Georgia used lottery money to become the first state to introduce a statewide universal pre-k program, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

But getting a spot in some prekindergarten classes can be tough. About 200 children have been on a waiting list for Catoosa County’s pre-k program since last spring.

Kids Bank is an example of an educational day-care program, and officials said there are an array of other facilities, such as church-operated day-care learning programs.

In other situations, such as in Bradley County, Tenn., there is a blend of public and private pre-k options plus Head Start programs, Mr. Kelley said.

There also are plenty of online resources, such as Smart from the Start, which provides suggestions for parents when they are teaching their children.

research

One of the first studies to tackle the importance of early education was the 1960s High/Scope Perry Preschool study.

For the study, one group of at-risk children was given a high-quality preschool education and another group received no early education, according to the High/Scope Educational Research Foundation.

In 2005, researchers contacted 97 percent of the participants as they turned 40. Those who participated in the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes and were more likely to have graduated from high school.

But not all experts are convinced that early education programs have long-term benefits, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research. NIEER studies, though, do find at the very least that there are short-term benefits.

Experts and parents in the region said they’ve seen the positive effects of early education.

Mr. Kelley said that besides important brain development, early education can improve attitudes towards learning and social skills.

Holly Robinson, Georgia commissioner of Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning, said early education is a powerful predictor of school readiness.

About 65 percent of Georgia students are in some sort of early learning program, she said, which means children who begin kindergarten without such a program begin at a disadvantage. That can shape a student’s attitude toward school and learning, Ms. Robinson said.

Alyson Riley works with Sequatchie Valley Head Start and sent her autistic son to the program when he was 3. She said she was looking for a program that could handle him because he was “nonverbal and fairly aggressive.”

“We had been told that we needed to be prepared for the fact that he may not acquire language,” she said. But after two years in the Head Start program, her son is starting a public school in a mainstream kindergarten class.

“He talks as much, if not more, than any other 5-year-old,” she said. “We were in his neurologist’s office this summer (who) said, ‘Honestly, if you brought him in now, we could not diagnose him any longer as autistic.’”