Pre-K
Research has overwhelmingly shown that universal pre-kindergarten has huge long-term benefits, academically and for society. Can you or will you do anything to bring universal pre-K to Juneau?
Absolutely. It’s something I feel very passionate about and something that I’ve been working on over the last several years in my free time. I’m a member of the Alaska Early Childhood Coordinating Council, which is really dedicated to understanding how to support children at that age. There’s a tremendous amount of research out there that supports that and a business community across the nation recognizes that that is a good return on investment. I think education needs to be viewed in terms of the investment that it is for society as well as the benefits for individual children. The return on investment of early childhood education is indisputable. We should be investing more and it will pay us back individually for the children, but also for our larger society. We’ll avoid costs later on in life. There’s a lot of evidence that special education costs during the K-12 years can be avoided if high quality early childhood education is available.
I would do everything I could to support. Of course we all are working within a budget. Having said that, I would certainly do everything I could to support it. In addition to that, it’s absolutely critical that along with kids coming to school ready to learn in kindergarten, which means some text background, that by fourth grade, our kids are reading at grade level, which means we really need to also, along with the preschool focus, with an emphasis on the importance of learning to read in k-3, including reading interventions for our kids who are not reading quite as fast.
I think if universal pre-k means that every single child within Juneau has the opportunity to participate in pre-k, we would absolutely love to do that. I know you probably know that we do have some pre-k programs going on right now within our schools and of course we would love to see that expanded and find ways of doing that. There are a variety of options right now, it doesn’t cover I think the universal aspect of your question of each and every kid within the Juneau School District. Yes, I certainly support trying to expand that, pre-k as you indicated has a huge positive effect if it’s done well at that age group and absolutely has to be supported in every way possible.
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