Amy Philley has students surround each other teaching students about planets and the solar system in her VPK class at the Gonzalez United Methodist Child Enrichment Center in Cantonment, Fl. Wednesday, April 29, 2015. (Michael Spooneybarger/ Pensacola Today)

When you ask Bruce Watson about getting the message out about the importance of early education in a child’s life, there is a woman who comes to mind.

She wouldn’t put her 4-year-old in voluntary prekindergarten “because the child’s grandmother was so enjoying the opportunity to help raise the child.”

The social skills, the sight word building, the interaction with other children were things this child would miss out on, said Watson, who is the executive director of the Escambia County Early Learning Coalition. Even though all of that is available for free.

That’s more than a missed educational opportunity for that one child.

It’s a missed opportunity to invest in a program that helps children build the skills they need to be ready for school — a measure that is one of 16 key metrics in the Studer Community Institute’s Metro Dashboard.

Children who are kindergarten ready have more success throughout their school careers than those who aren’t.

Unfortunately, it is likely to be late 2017 before we will know how many of the Pensacola metro area’s children made the grade when they started school.

Last year, problems with the Florida Assessments for Instruction in Reading (FAIR) assessment surfaced.

FAIR was one of two sets of tests kindergarten teachers had to administer in the first 30 days of school to gauge a child’s readiness.The old FAIR had two parts — letter naming and sounds. Last year’s FAIR had six parts: alphabetics, (phonological awareness, letter sounds); oral language (vocabulary pairs and following directions); comprehension (listening comprehension and sentence comprehension).

The test went all-electronic last year and glitches in the system across the state led to teachers crying foul and the state dropped the test. The test also was used to evaluate the effectiveness of VPK providers. 

“They did it on the fly, they did it too fast, and it was not acceptable to teachers,” Watson says of the FAIR testing. “They got such criticism, they threw the results out completely, and without (that) score, there’s nothing.”

The Office of Early Learning this year told VPK providers that everything is status quo for the next year.

“If you were on probation from a year ago, you will remain on probation,” Watson says. “It’s good for the providers who were not low performing last year because there’s no risk now.”

A year of status quo

Providers who were on probation will continue to operate under those probationary requirements. Watson says those requirements can include staff performance plans, creating portfolios for each child with added detail to monitor his or her progress, and they must be in a Teaching Strategy Gold (TSG) program.

That program uses observation three times a school year to rate a child’s performance on a laundry list of observational behaviors at each age group. It includes math and language arts milestones (counting with blocks, recognizing numbers and letters, sight word development), as well as social and emotional development milestones.

Kindergarten readiness data from eight counties that have Children's Services Councils, as well as data for Escambia and Santa Rosa counties.

“The premise….changes the culture of the teacher so they are aware of the net effects of what they present the children and to see if the child’s behavior changes over time,” Watson says.

Children can be scored on a continuum — always, sometimes, not yet, never. Previous assessments were more focused on phonics and math.

This year, providers will do only one evaluation on the system — in the spring.

Because the children won’t be evaluated at the beginning of the year — to establish the baseline of where they started — the spring data won’t be usable for accountability.

Instead it will be an exercise in training VPK teachers and providers how to use the tool, Watson said.

For the 2016-2017 school year, they will do all three checkpoints. The data would be compiled and analyzed through the fall of 2017, which means the earliest we would have a readiness rate for VPK again that is statistically meaningful is by the end of 2017 or in January of 2018, Watson says.

Complicating the system

This year, Watson believes he’ll provide services for about 2,200 children. He says 2,400 has been the running norm in recent years.

The decline could be the result of a dip in the birth rate in the recessionary times of 2010-2011, Watson says. He also suspects another factor at play.

Registration for VPK is 100 percent electronic.

“Now I’ve got to have a computer,” Watson says. “I’ve got to upload my documents (birth certificate, a utility bill or mortgage or rent statement for proof of residence). I’ve got to have an email address.”

Watson says the coalition has helped 300 to 400 of their parents get email addresses set up this year. And while parents can come to the coalition office for help with this process, not every client has.

“I think we’ve made it too hard for some people to get into the program,” Watson says.

Which is a crying shame.

Because data from the Office of Early Learning bears out what kindergarten teachers across the Pensacola metro area can see in the first weeks of school.

Of the Escambia County children who completed VPK, 80.4 percent were kindergarten ready in August of 2014. Of the children who had no preschool, 50 percent were ready for kindergarten.

“When I talk to kindergarten teachers across the county,” Watson says, “they can tell children who have had VPK from those children who’ve had nothing.”