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Riverside County, CA November 7, 2006 Election
Smart Voter

Preparing Kids for School

By Rita J. Peters

Candidate for Board Member; Menifee Union School District

This information is provided by the candidate
Are you as a public aware of the criteria that is faced by pre school kids getting ready to start kindergarten? As a society, it should be a concern because if these kids don't hit the street running at an early age they will be dropping out and filling up our prison systems. It would be far better to put the money in up front prior to kindergarten then at the end when they don't make it and become a prison statistic.
California guidelines say children of this age should begin to recognize some letters of the alphabet, as well as their own written names. Their vocabularies by this time should include three to four thousand words of increasing complexity. Where math is concerned, four and five year-olds should be able to count up to 10, demonstrate an understanding of time, associate numbers with quantities of objects and identify simple shapes like circles and triangles. Additionally, children should be able to cooperate with others and show progress in expressing their feelings, needs and opinions in difficult situations. In today's world, most households have two parents working, usually with lots of travel time to and from job, and there is very little time put aside for pre schooling. Yet in other countries, students far exceed our academic levels by a long shot. Pre-schools for ages 4 & 5 need to be established and the educational system as it sits, needs some realigning. There is not enough time spent in classrooms as is and if we have such large expectations for kindergarteners - revamping needs to be done. I will spend my next term looking at this issue and clearly emphasizing and demanding more time in the classrooms and the possibility of mandatory pre school for 4 & 5 year olds. We can not stay ahead of pre-school now - we start pre schools and they fill up with a waiting list of equal the amount of students that just enrolled.

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ca/rv Created from information supplied by the candidate: September 20, 2006 08:23
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