It has been nearly four years since Escambia County has new data about how ready our kindergartners are for school.

Back in 2014, data showed that 66 percent of Escambia kindergartners were ready for school — which meant about 1,000 of our children weren’t ready at the schoolhouse door.

Data from the Florida Department of Education released in May 2018 tells us that the news got worse.

Only 45.77 percent of Escambia County kids who started kindergarten in the fall of 2017 were “kindergarten ready.” That means of the 2,908 children who started school, 1,577 boys and girls did not have all of the basic academic skills they needed to be ready to learn to read, count, and begin their school journey primed for success.

It makes Escambia 53rd out of 67 Florida counties in terms of kindergarten readiness. Of the 17 counties with a similar size population, Escambia County ranks last in school readiness.

It’s the first time since 2014 that the state has released kindergarten readiness rate data, and it shows that we as a community still have much work to do to make sure that our children get a chance for a good start in school and life.

“Kindergarten readiness is an important marker for the beginning of a child’s journey in school,” said Shannon Nickinson, Studer Community Institute’s director of early learning. “More than that, it is increasingly viewed by economists and other experts as a measurement of a community’s journey toward prosperity and a good quality of life for everyone who lives there.

“Our community has made great progress in the last five years toward making Pensacola a vibrant place to work and raise a family in. But this data tells us that we have much more work to do.”

Santa Rosa County’s readiness rate was 60 percent; overall the state of Florida’s rate was 54 percent.

Escambia School Superintendent Malcolm Thomas said the test has a strong focus on early literacy skills, which children need to be ready to learn to read. 

“Some of the tests the state has tried in the past have left that out,” Thomas noted. “The fact that you can hop on one foot doesn’t tell me if you’re going to be ready for school. You have to get into the sound-symbol relations, numeration skills, those are better indicators of whether students are going to be ready when they come to school. 

“You’ve got to have those gross and fine motor skills, too, but to define ready for today’s kindergarten, it is a lot more about early literacy and ability to start learning how to read and perform math calculations.”

Problems with previous screening tools led to a lag in kindergarten readiness rate reporting fom 2014 until this year.

Kindergarten readiness is an important educational — and many say economic — indicator of a community’s health and future prospects. That’s why the measure is included in the Studer Community Institute’s Community Dashboard. See the dashboard here.

Statewide, 187,322 students were screened with the Star Early Literacy Screening tool. It the first year of a three-contract the state has to use that particular screening tool.

“That’s why we had to have this assessment tool that would set some baseline of performance,” Thomas said. “An experienced kindergarten teacher in the first 5 minutes, they can tell you who’s ready. And the kids can, too. 

“(Kids who aren’t ready) don’t have the vocabulary and experiences the other kids have. It all separates when they come into that classroom. We know expectations for schooling have changed. The world has shifted and we have to make that shift and it starts the day the child is born. The parent, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, they are the child’s first teacher. And the child’s first teacher is going to make or break the deal.”