On Thursday, Feb. 22, the Florida Department of Education released the Kindergarten Readiness scores for this past fall. Escambia County’s readiness increased by 4.5%, with 49.5% of the incoming kindergarten students ready for school, up from 45.1% in the fall of 2022. Escambia is only 1.7 percentage points below the statewide average of 51.2%.
A key to Escambia County’s success appears to be having more students in the Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten (VPK) program. The VPK students outperformed other kindergarteners – 60.2% to 35.5%. Escambia County had 97 more VPK students score well on the screening than in 2022.
In an email to Early Learning Coalition executive directors, Cari Miller, the chancellor of Early Learning for Florida, wrote, “The results prove that students who participate in Florida’s VPK program are more likely to enter kindergarten prepared for school.”
Escambia County had five elementary schools that had less than a third of the kindergarteners ready for school—Oakcrest (14% ready), Ensley (23%), Lincoln Park (23%), O.J. Semmes (26%) and Warrington (28%). Warrington and Lincoln Park were F schools last year, Ensley and O.J. Semmes were D schools, and Oakcrest earned a C. For them to have reached the 50% mark for readiness, the schools needed 75 more children to pass the screening.
The state didn’t provide VPK statistics for individual schools, but maybe School Superintendent Keith Leonard’s “corridors of concern” will tell how many benefited from enrollment in VPK. According to the superintendent’s announcement at the last Escambia Children’s Trust meeting, the “corridors” will provide academic data for each school’s attendance zone.
The improvement in kindergarten readiness should be celebrated, and I’m sure several entities will take credit for the success because no one nonprofit or agency did it alone. However, we are far below the 75% mark that Achieve Escambia said it wanted to achieve by 2025 and Pensacola Chamber 2030 Blueprint’s “bold, audacious” goal of having all kindergartens ready to start goal before the end of this decade.
Those goals were unachievable, and Achieve Escambia and the Pensacola Chamber have yet to do much to make them happen other than announce them and hold meetings. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t set goals.
Kindergarten readiness helps with academic success. According to the U.S. Department of Education, children who are prepared to start school are 17% more likely to graduate high school, four times more likely to graduate college and 19% less likely to be arrested.
What is a reasonable goal for kindergarten readiness? Florida has only three counties with more than 60% of their kindergarteners prepared to start school on their first day—St. Johns (69%), Seminole (64%) and Brevard (61%). Nearly three-fourths of St. Johns County’s children participated in VPK programs, while the other had more than 65% in VPK. Escambia County only had 43% enrolled in VPK.
A reasonable goal for Escambia County’s kindergarten readiness is 60% by 2030. For Achieve Escambia to reach its 75% milestone, we needed to have an additional 900 children ready for kindergarten. However, we only need 185 more kids enrolled to reach the 60% goal, putting us among the top 10 Florida counties.
To hit 60% kindergarten readiness, that would take us getting at least 290 more children in VPK programs. Our community would need to add 27 more VPK classrooms to stay within the class requirement of 11 students per lead instructor.
To increase our chances of improving, we should strive to raise the percentage of children attending VPK programs from 43% to 65% or higher, like St. Johns, Seminole and Brevard. That jump would require us to have 607 more kids in VPK and add 55 classrooms.
I know that’s a lot of math, and I may have lost you with my calculations. Let me restate my goal.
By 2030, Escambia County will increase the annual enrollment in VPK programs by 290 children. We can do it by adding six to seven additional VPK classrooms over the next five years and recruiting children for them. If we do, our readiness rate will be above 60% by the end of this decade.