Emily Hays
Hundreds of families have chosen not to enroll their preschoolers and kindergarteners in New Haven Public Schools this year.
The sudden decline is part of a statewide drop in enrollment driven primarily by the youngest grades. In New Haven, the preschool program has shrunk by 13.5 percent and the kindergarten class has shrunk by 19.6 percent.
Microsoft Team
CSDE’s Ajit Gopalakrishnan: We think families are delaying kindergarten and pre-K.
“Our general impression here is that perhaps parents are choosing to keep these younger kids home and delay their start of public schooling due to the pandemic,” said Ajit Gopalakrishnan, the chief performance officer for the Connecticut State Department of Education.
Gopalakrishnan cautioned during a press conference on the dataset that it is still preliminary. The state normally waits until early February to release enrollment data and still has normal data cleaning processes to do.
Numerically, New Haven has some of the steepest drops between the number of kindergarteners and preschoolers enrolled last year and this year. The city school system lost 285 kindergarteners compared to last year’s enrollment numbers — more than any other district.
Other districts have lost much larger percentages of their programs. Scaled by the size of the grade level, NHPS’ kindergarten decline is the 40th largest and its preschool decline ranks 102nd.
Emily Hays
The district has also seen a loss of magnet school students to Catholic schools and public schools in surrounding districts with in-person classes.
Overall, NHPS enrollment is down 3 percent compared to last year. That’s the same as the statewide enrollment decrease. While the drop is sudden for the state compared to previous five years, New Haven had a similarly large enrollment decrease last year of 2.8 percent and a larger decline in preschool enrollment than this year.
Gopalakrishnan said that the pandemic is the only variable that has changed statewide.
“I sure hope all those students are back [when the pandemic is over]. It is really important for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten to be part of a high-quality educational experience so students get foundational skills right at the outset,” Gopalakrishnan said.
Racial Disparities
Connecticut State Department of Education
The state has also released a report on who attended more than half of their classes during September. As New Haven has found, English learners and students with disabilities are attending less often than their peers.
Students who do not have any of these needs and are not low-income are attending as well as they do in previous years. However, students with high needs, especially if they have multiple needs, are not attending school as much as they did last year.
The report also shows racial disparities in attendance. White students are going to school as much as they did last year, while Black and Latino students are now on average chronically absent, according to this dataset.
Like the enrollment report, the attendance report has significant caveats. The state is measuring attendance month by month for the first time, and school districts are learning when to count remote students as attending class.
The state’s press release was accompanied by a list of ways the state is trying to provide guidance and help to districts as they grapple with these enrollment declines and attendance disparities.
One of these measures is Talk Tuesdays, a virtual meeting of high-need districts with the state to talk about resource needs and best practices. The state education department’s Chief Operating Officer Charlene Russell-Tucker noted that New Haven has shared its own best practices during these calls, including knocking on the doors of disengaged students to find out what they need.
If I had a little one; I would do my best to keep him/her at home. Isn't kindergarten not even required? They must go to school for first grade; no?