In our “Lessons Learned Early” series, we follow one pre-kindergartener through his first year of school.
More than halfway through, Florida has decided to do away with a time-consuming student-evaluation tool his voluntary pre-kindergarten teachers used.
While Some Duval County VPK teachers are celebrating that decision, many advocates are saying the tool was necessary.
On a February school day, John Seng was listening to a story about an injured sea turtle in his classroom on the University of North Florida campus. After the story, kids passed around real human X-Rays. John pointed out his was of a leg.
John is more than halfway through his first year of free school, funded by the state and he has no idea how much lobbying and controversy goes on outside these walls.
This month, Florida lawmakers defunded a VPK student-evaluation tool called Teaching Strategies Gold and stopped requiring its use starting this summer.
Mahreen Mian, UNF’s VPK director, said using the tool took up a lot of teachers’ time.
“One of the things that I guess I personally feel like is it takes the teachers away from the children,” she said.
Teachers had to maintain detailed documentation.
Social-emotional, physical, cognitive, language, math and literacy were just some of the 10 categories of development teachers must track for each student.
Some of the documentation is cut and dry.
“Can they jump? Can the move from place to place,” Mian explained.
But other categories require documenting student behavior with cameras.
Mian had pulled up a photo of John on her computer with the Teaching Strategies program. Underneath his photo is a paragraph describing what he was doing.
“So you see John while playing in the sandbox; he another child, they were using the watering can,” she said. “So he was interacting with his peers and then he was thinking symbolically.”
Mian said teachers have to track students' progress all year round. There’s no downtime. And teachers must complete the evaluation for each student, three times during the year.
Next year, though, teachers won’t have to use the tool anymore. But Mian says the tool is actually really informative. She said her VPK is lucky to be able to continue using it voluntarily. Her center used it prior to the state mandating it last year.
“It tells you where your child is,” she said. “It tells you what they need to work on. It gives you in a snapshot. You can tell where the child is.”
But she said the time and resources to do the evaluation aren’t available at every school. If the state gave more per-student funding — right now it’s $2,400 — or paid for iPads to conduct the program, that would help.
Susan Main, director of the Early Learning Coalition of Duval County, agreed.
She said it gives the teacher a real holistic look at the child, more so than the assessments VPK kids will still have to take.
The Early Learning Coalition oversees Duval’s 406 VPKs. Main said most centers will probably opt out of Learning Strategies.
“We are planning on supporting those programs that would like to continue to use it,” she said. “We’re looking to see how we can support them financially.”
At the same time, she’s happy with new funding VPKs can use in other areas. Parents will be able to get a free child developmental assessment and follow-up assistance if the child isn’t on track through the Help me Grow program. The state program was allocated $650,000.
There’s also more funding for Teacher Education and Compensation Helps scholarships, so teachers can get more training. Main said she hopes VPK teachers will utilize them to get a bachelor’s or associate's degree.
Meanwhile, Governor Rick Scott vetoed half a million dollars for a Duval pilot program that could have been implemented statewide to measure the quality of VPKs. Florida is one of a handful of states that doesn’t use a statewide quality rating system. Scott said he vetoed the money because many communities have their own quality-rating systems already.
