All-day school for three-year-olds a silly idea
Vancouver Sun
September 15, 2008
Editorial By: Noel Herron, former Vancouver principal and school trustee.

'Why, grandpa?" is one of the most persistent questions that I get from our three-year-old grandson Braedon, perched in his booster seat in the back of my car, as I occasionally drive him from Vancouver to Richmond to his family day care center.

As I respond to these frequent questions, I realize that they are Braedon's initial ways of making sense of the world around him and his place in it. What has been called in the literature the "brain architecture" of very young children is busy in my back seat building a neuron scaffolding with the wonders of the world around him.

Recently these questions assumed an added importance when I read a preschool interview in The Vancouver Sun with our minister of education, Shirley Bond, in which she stressed the importance of early childhood education and stated that the province is studying the concept of full-time kindergarten for five-year-olds and perhaps even four- and three-year-olds.

What a balmy idea for three-year-olds.

We have learned from the science of early learning and development over the past few decades the importance of launching carefully structured and developmentally appropriate early childhood programs and initiatives for very young preschoolers. These initiatives, if properly constructed, break down the artificial barriers between day care and early learning programs.

But nowhere does this cumulative research point to all-day kindergarten programs for three-year olds.

Variations on high quality family day care that embrace a play-based learning, yes, but formal kindergarten for tender three-year-olds, never.

I doubt if there is a single submission to the province's Early Learning Agency (set up last February to "study the feasibility and cost of all-day kindergarten for five-year-olds and optional programs for children as young as three") that would endorse this proposition

Certainly the crisis in day care, including after-school care, underlines the need for seamless, high-quality child care anchored to more effective pre-school education programs which are now under the jurisdiction of newly designated boards of education.

There is a certain irony, if not cynicism, to our education minister's admission that child care now seems to have a valid place in the broad continuum of pre-school programs and services.

But you would never know this, up to now, from a government that literally dumped on child care -- cancelling the NDP's comprehensive child care plan in 2001, reneging on the subsequent election promise to implement the nascent $7-a-day universal out-of-school care program followed by last year's 27-per-cent cut in support services.

What about our four-year-old pre-schoolers?

With B.C. having the highest child poverty rate of any Canadian province for the fifth year in a row, and the premier's own advisory panel warning about the widening poverty disconnect, there is a very strong case to be made, based on more than three decades of both Canadian and American research and practice, for implementing targeted half-day or full-day classes for disadvantaged four-year-olds in school districts with critical masses of poor children.

As for the five-year-olds, B.C. is the only province with restrictive and discriminatory entrance requirements (confined to ESL, certain special needs and aboriginal children) for its all-day kindergarten classes, thereby denying thousands of "other" kids valuable early childhood learning experiences every year.

The February 2007 speech from the throne noted that there are "currently approximately 25 per cent of children [in B.C.] who are not ready to learn when they enter kindergarten," which provides a strong rationale for the long overdue availability of universal all-day kindergarten.

Three years ago this province agreed with other provinces that the five guiding principles of any child care program must be quality, universally inclusive, accessible and developmental. But the gap between agreement and implementation in B.C. is as wide as the Grand Canyon.

One wonders where Bond gets the justification for her recent off-the-wall statement that, "I can only speak to the record we've had since 2001, and we've clearly been a leader across the country in early childhood education" when the facts speak otherwise.

Spin should not be allowed to replace substance. Our pre-schoolers deserve better.