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Teachers, parents urge Western Placer Unified to keep full‑day kindergarten, warn of learning loss
Summary
Teachers and parents told the Western Placer Unified board that a proposed return to half‑day kindergarten would cut hundreds of instructional hours, undermine early‑literacy gains and increase family child‑care costs; speakers asked the district and board to seek alternatives to classroom reductions.
Members of the public and district educators told the Western Placer Unified School District board that a proposed rollback from the district’s extended‑day kindergarten to a half‑day model would remove instruction that they say is critical to early literacy and social skills.
The comments, made during the meeting’s public‑comment period, came after teacher Jennifer Stacy said a separate judicial communication — which she identified as coming from Judge Lavin — indicated the district’s schedule change was postponed until 2027. Stacy, an art teacher at Lindsay Kaufman, told the board the postponement did not lessen her concern that the change would “take us backwards by more than five years.”
Why it matters: Teachers and parents said extended kindergarten time has been central to recent early‑literacy gains at district schools and that cutting daily minutes would both reduce learning time and shift added child‑care costs to families.
Stacy laid out the math the speakers said illustrated the scale of the change. “Our current kindergarten day runs from 08:15 to 01:40,” she said. “If we move to a half‑day schedule that runs from 08:00 to 11:20, we would have 125 minutes each day. That’s a loss of two hours daily times 180 days for a school year. You do the math. That is a lot of instruction lost.”
Regina Hennenkamp, a kindergarten teacher with three decades in the district, described in‑classroom benefits tied to the extended schedule: longer periods to build relationships, to teach social‑emotional skills and to deliver a systematic phonics program the school adopted, UFLI. “With the extended day, we’re able to give our students a strong foundation for first grade,” Hennenkamp said, describing students who could write sentences and meet end‑of‑year benchmarks.
Speakers pressed the board to consider alternatives to reducing instructional time, including different facility‑planning solutions. Stacy also raised the prospect of out‑of‑pocket impacts for families, saying the difference in cost for after‑school care between a TK student and a full‑day kindergarten student was about $180 a month.
The public comments reflected two related themes: instructional and programmatic risk, and family economic impact. Several speakers tied their remarks to the district’s investments in early literacy — including Title I funds, classroom aides and the district’s adoption of UFLI — saying the investments could be undermined by shorter days.
Board response and next steps were not recorded in the public comment portion transcribed. One speaker said a judicial communication had postponed any schedule change to 2027; the transcript did not record a formal board vote or a staff motion during the public‑comment segment. As a result, the board’s formal position and any staff directions on the proposal were not specified in the transcript.
Supporters of the extended day urged the district office and school board to identify alternatives to classroom reductions and to preserve instructional minutes and supports funded with federal and site monies.
