The board is expected to introduce a policy change Tuesday night.
By: Jeff Milgram
The Princeton Regional Board of Education is expected to introduce a policy change tonight that would move the cutoff date for kindergarten enrollment up a month each year over a two-year period, starting in the fall of 2001.
The change will mean that children would have to be 5 years old by Oct. 31 to begin kindergarten in September 2001. The cutoff date would be advanced another month, to Sept. 30, in the fall of 2002.
The present policy is to enroll children who are 5 years old by Nov. 30. The new cutoff dates are more in line with neighboring districts, school board President Charlotte Bialek said Monday.
The change will require two public hearings — at tonight’s board meeting and at the next meeting on June 20.
Ms. Bialek said nursery school teachers, parents and Princeton Regional teachers and administrators have urged the district to move up the cutoff date.
Ms. Bialek said the new policy will narrow the age spread in class, which can be as wide as two years.
Interim Superintendent Austin Gumbs said the change will limit the number of students who are starting school “prematurely.”
“Socially, they’re not ready” to begin school, Dr. Gumbs said.
“Many parents hold children, mostly sons, back a year” because they don’t thinks the child is mature enough for school, Ms. Bialek said.
As a personal example of the age spread in school, Dr. Gumbs said his own grandson graduated from high school when he was 19 years old, at least a year older than most of the students in his class, because he missed the kindergarten cutoff by a month.
The change also will keep down the school population at a time when the board is considering extensive construction to expand and renovate school buildings, Dr. Gumbs said.
School officials believe the policy change could decrease the size of the incoming kindergarten class by as much as 25 students, out of a total of some 300 new kindergartners a year.
By changing the cutoff date in 2001, the school board hopes to give parents sufficient notice.
School bord member Joshua Leinsdorf speculated that the change might upset some parents.
“Some people are real anxious for their kids to start school because it relieves them of another year of preschool,” Mr. Leinsdorf said Monday. “There are a lot of people who have been counting on sending their kids to a full-day kindergarten program at public expense” who will now have to pay for another year of preschool, he said.
“School provides a day-care function, not just an education,” Mr. Leinsdorf said.
The parents of boys who mature later than girls, on the other hand, might favor the change, he said.
Dr. Gumbs believes some parents will object to the new cutoff date because their child is reading and, they believe, thus ready for school.
“There are some districts where they test the kids,” Dr. Gumbs said.