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By Kimberly Beltran
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
A tiny school district in rural Sonoma County was granted relief last week from a state law requiring that students enrolled in a transitional kindergarten program receive the same instructional time as those in regular kindergarten.
The California State Board of Education approved the waiver request by Forestville Union Elementary, which argued that the district’s lone school serves a total of only 375 students, of which only two or three are typically eligible for transitional kindergarten – making the addition of a separate program unfeasible.
Scott Mahoney, interim superintendent at Forestville, said the district had included a 180-minute transitional kindergarten program within its two regular kindergarten classes, which run from 8:30 a.m. to 2:55 p.m., not knowing that state law requires an equal amount of instructional time for the younger students.
Transitional kindergarten was introduced three years ago by the Legislature after lawmakers adjusted the admission date to regular kindergarten in phases so that new students must be five years old by Sept. 1 in 2014-15 to attend. To soften the blow on parents, the Legislature also ordered school districts to begin offering the transitional program to those four-year-olds that would have otherwise been able to attend regular kindergarten.
At issue is the equity length of time requirement for transitional and kindergarten programs that lawmakers included in the enabling legislation to ensure the younger students didn’t get short-changed.
Education Code Section 37202 requires that all students at a given grade level in a district receive “an equal length” of instructional time, according to the SBE staff report. The minimum length of instructional time that must be offered to
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