The SC Legislature has no more important obligation than providing a decent education for all children. It’s right there in the state constitution (hence: obligation), and getting it right will do more than all business-friendly efforts to attract good jobs to our state, end poverty and make South Carolina a place where we want our children and grandchildren to spend their lives.
And the crucial first step to getting it right is to ensure that all children start school ready to learn: able to count and recite the alphabet and name their colors – and yes, there are many 5 year olds who don’t know how to do any of these things, and most of them never reach them – and are able to play well with others and respect authority and use their inner voices, as well as possess a host of other soft and hard skills that middle-class parents take for granted.
This makes offering poor children a 4-year-old kindergarten program designed to teach these things one of the best investments our state can make. Therefore, we are encouraged to see that, after getting out of the way in the fall with his efforts to pay parents to drop out of public schools, Governor Henry McMaster shifted his focus to early childhood education.
In place of his ill-conceived plan for public school vouchers, the governor announced last week that he would spend $ 7 million in COVID federal aid funds to provide expanded day and summer programs for children eligible for the full-day 4K program. . This will serve the dual purpose of providing even more enrichment for the children who need it most and allowing their parents to go back to work.
And McMaster’s 2021-22 state budget proposal, released days later, calls on the legislature to spend $ 48 million to expand 4K to cover all children living in poverty, not just those in the poorest school districts; this could almost double the number of enrollments.
“Before the COVID-19 pandemic, data indicated that South Carolina’s low-income, five-year-old children are increasingly entering kindergarten unprepared to learn and without the necessary literacy and language skills. ”Said the governor. “It makes them immediately at risk” and is unlikely to reach them. In the third grade, the best indicators of progress and future success are reading and writing skills. Without them, these children are less likely to graduate or obtain the necessary skills. to enter the job market and contribute to our economy and its own success. An absence of 10 months in a normal classroom probably made the problem worse. ”
Fortunately, many children did not miss 10 months of 4K, although they all lost more than two months, while Mr. McMaster closed all schools and those enrolled in 4K public school programs lost three or four months because public schools refused to allow students back to the classroom in September. Worse, many parents removed their children from 4K programs during the pandemic; enrollment dropped 12% in private, nonprofit daycare centers and 23% in 4K classes in public schools.
Worse, we never had enough children enrolled in 4K classes, something the state just took seriously two decades ago, despite decades of brain research showing that what happens in the first four or five years of life plays a role. critical in a child’s success.
With parents who read to them and play with them, their children’s brains form the neural pathways that make learning easier for the rest of their lives. Without that stimulus – with hours in front of the TV, or any other screen, instead of personal interaction and encouragement and education – their brains don’t develop as well and learning is difficult.
Therefore, we urge the Legislature to adopt the governor’s 4K spending proposal and overcome it, also expanding our state’s commitment to even earlier education, through smart first-time school readiness programs designed to help parents to be better teachers for their children from birth to 3 years old. Even if we eventually get all the fundamentals that the children lost during the pandemic, it still won’t be enough for the many, many children in our state who were not yet getting the fundamentals they need to succeed.
