All-day kindergarten a good education investment
Vancouver Sun
Jul 3 2009
Letter to Editor By: Patti Bacchus Chair, Vancouver Board of Education

Shelley Fralic opens her column, "All-day kindergarten will give taxpayers new role as babysitter" (June 27) by dismissing all-day kindergarten as "too rich for provincial coffers in these financially challenging times."

She continues with more dismissals and assumptions, including referring to early learning in a school setting as the "warehousing" of children, ignoring or perhaps unaware of the consensus among educators that early childhood education must be play-based and age-appropriate.

Instead, she says we're "anxious" to "get them out of the sandbox and into academics," further writing that studies suggest "the state-funded merging of daycare and school will ultimately destroy the ideology of family."

What she fails to note is that research not only shows early learning and full-day kindergarten benefit many children but that the economic return on education investment is significantly higher the earlier in life it occurs.

The Vancouver Board of Education supports all-day kindergarten for five-year olds and allocates resources to ensure many of our neediest students have access to it. But we are unable to provide it to all students unless the provincial government fulfils its commitment to do so. All-day kindergarten is not babysitting, as Fralic suggests in her last sentence, but an investment in our children that can be expected to pay dividends down the road. The real question is whether we can afford the longer-term costs of not investing early, where the money is spent most effectively.