Kindergarten Cadets

Students will be tested for a new "junior-k" classification

Dentin Kapuniai's feet don't touch the floor even from a tiny kindergarten chair, and he won't turn 5 until November, but he's as poised as can be on his first day at Puohala Elementary School.

Though he'll be one of the youngest in his class, he easily handles questions about shapes, colors and numbers in a one-on-one testing session designed to gauge his school readiness.

It's his mother, Shelly, who's the nervous one.

"I'm a little worried because he's so young. He's got a lot of catching up to do," she says, noting that Dentin did not attend preschool.

"I kind of wanted to wait a year, but he was so excited about starting school."

It's a scene that will play out at schools across the islands in the days and weeks ahead as teachers try to get the measure of the state's roughly 15,000 incoming kindergartners amid the statewide rollout of a new junior kindergarten concept.

For years, schools have accepted kindergartners born in the latter half of the year. But now, a law passed in 2004 instructs schools to classify their newest pupils as either kindergartners or junior kindergartners.

Junior kindergartners who are deemed not ready to move on to first grade next year will be considered as "promoted" from junior kindergarten to kindergarten.

That would be just fine with Kapuniai.

"I'd be totally OK with that. I don't want to push him too hard and get him frustrated," she says.

That is one of the main aims of the "junior-k" concept, which is based on the belief that students who take that extra year in the kindergarten ranks will encounter fewer learning problems as they move up the grades than if they were pushed too fast. At the same time, it removes the stigma usually associated with being "held back."

Thirty-seven schools piloted the program last year, but the state essentially remains in pilot mode again this year, with schools statewide taking different approaches on implementation.

Some will mix the two kindergarten levels in the same classrooms, while others will keep them separate.

"This will be a very telling year, now that we've got everybody on board. The pilots gave us a snapshot, but we can't make any conclusions right now on the best way forward," said Dr. Stephen Shiraki, the Department of Education specialist overseeing the rollout.

Nanaikapono Elementary, one of the pilot schools, partially combined classes last year. But it plans to separate them this year into kindergarten and junior-k groupings to allow teachers to focus on children with similar abilities, said junior-k teacher Terrie Simpson.

"There is such a wide range of abilities among students. We think this will be easier on teachers," she said.

Kuhio Elementary, on the other hand, plans mixed classrooms, believing that higher achievers help pull up the slow starters, said Principal Evelyn Hao.

"That type of thing has worked well for us in the past. Kids come in with different skills and abilities and experiences, but they can learn a lot from each other," she said.

Somewhere in the middle are schools like Hokulani Elementary.

Students will be mixed in their homerooms to allow the tortoises to rub elbows with the hares for much of the day. But for core subjects like reading and math, students will break up and go to different teachers based on ability.

"We don't want to come right out and put different kids on separate tracks. That's too rigid, and it puts limits on a child's potential. But at the same time we want to maximize the learning (in the core subjects)," Principal Donna Lum said.

One thing schools could have in common is greater communication between teachers and parents, to prevent an unpleasant surprise when the promotion decision is made.

This goes for parents of early-born kids as well. Officially, children born between Aug. 1 and Dec. 31 are the targets of junior kindergarten, but many schools will make their decisions on which students are in junior-k based not on age, but on how students do in early assessments.

"Age really doesn't have much to do with it. I've seen many November or December birthdays surpass someone born in January," said Lum.

The communication is likely to extend to what parents can do with their kids at home to keep them on course for first grade.

"It's very simple: read, read, read and ask your child probing questions, because everything at that level is based on vocabulary and language," said Hao.

Pilot schools say they saw no real increase in the number of kids being "promoted" to kindergarten last year, so it remains unclear how most parents would react to that prospect.

But teachers and principals say they might have to spend just as much time convincing skeptical parents that their kids are on track.

"Children act differently at school than at home," said Babette Arakaki, a junior-k teacher at Liholiho Elementary, one of the pilot schools. "So parents often don't think their kids are as mature as they really are, and I've had to convince them that, yes, your child is more than ready."

Not even teachers are immune to this when it comes to their own kids, said Liholiho kindergarten teacher Cindy Wong, whose daughter Serena was a junior kindergartner at the school last year.

At first, Wong did not want Serena to go straight to the first grade.

"I felt the maturity level was not there," she said, "but by spring she and the other kids really blossomed. They went at a slower pace that helped build their confidence."

Most schools say they plan every effort to get all kindergartners -- junior or not -- promoted to first grade, and will expect them all to learn the same things this year.

But this might require different teaching methods for the younger kids and their developmental peers, such as more play-oriented and hands-on activities.

For example, Liholiho's regular kindergartners absorbed a lesson about money and math last year by reading about it.

Arakaki, however, needed something more hands-on for her little pupils, so she organized a Halloween fair in which students bought and sold tickets for various items.

"What this all points out is that we need developmentally appropriate approaches to teaching children of varying abilities," said Liz Chun, executive director of Good Beginnings Alliance, the early-education advocates.

"If schools can address the needs of individual children, they should be able to move on" to first grade.

If not, that extra year in the kindergarten ranks can be a blessing, said Sandra Shawhan, principal of Kamalii Elementary on Maui, which has been running a program similar to junior kindergarten for several years.

"We've found that those who had that extra developmental year tend to do better academically in the upper grades," she said.

"The philosophy is it's better to have them at the head of one class than at the bottom of the next one."