Gwinnett County Public Schools has teamed up with local organizations and government agencies on an informational campaign to help parents prepare their children for kindergarten.
“We want every kid in Gwinnett to arrive in kindergarten ready to thrive,” said Babak Mostaghimi, the school district’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. “Pre-K is often actually too late to intervene.”
Called Building Babies’ Brains, the initiative involves a website that lists developmental milestones and tips for parents to help their children achieve them.
The school district has expanded its Play 2 Learn classes for parents of small children and created digital versions of everything since the coronavirus pandemic hit. Other community organizations, including the Gwinnett public library system, are adding early learning programming. The Community Foundation for Northeast Georgia and the local health department, which serves Gwinnett, Rockdale and Newton Counties, are also part of the Building Babies’ Brains working group.
Using a system based on Georgia’s early learning standards, the school district has found since 2016 that slightly more than half of Gwinnett kindergartners start the school year academically or socially unprepared.
“It impacted every single elementary school in Gwinnett,” Mostaghimi said. “In different amounts, but it was there and unfortunately prevalent across the board.”
That number may come as a shock to parents who planned on relying on the school district for their children’s early education.
“It used to be a belief that you just, like, show up at kindergarten and that’s when you start learning, and anything before that was just happenstance,” Mostaghimi said.
In the past 20 years or so, scientists and educators have learned better. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most children by age 5 can distinguish between reality and make-believe, tell a simple story using full sentences, count 10 or more things and stand on one foot for at least 10 seconds, among many other milestones on a checklist posted to the Building Babies’ Brains website.
The gap between students who show up prepared for kindergarten and those who don’t has widened with the socioeconomic divide, Mostaghimi said. Some parents have access to high-quality nursery schools or pre-kindergarten programs, or have the time, knowledge and resources to teach their babies and toddlers at home, he said.
“There’s another set of parents who don’t have access to those things, sometimes because they’re working and they can’t be at home to provide that high-quality experience, or the places they’re sending their kids to, because of affordability, aren’t providing the sort of quality that the parents and families need,” he said.
Studies show children who are ready for kindergarten are less likely to fall behind later in their academic careers. The amount of money and effort it takes to boost small children who are falling behind pales in comparison to turning around a failing high school senior, Mostaghimi said.
The Building Babies’ Brains website has been manually translated into Spanish and the partners are working on Korean and Vietnamese translations, Mostaghimi said.
“We wanted to make sure that every family felt welcome and that this is really a tool for everybody,” he said.
About 8,000 four-year-olds in Gwinnett County are in state lottery-funded or federal Head Start pre-kindergarten classes, according to the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning. The Gwinnett school district runs a pre-kindergarten program for students with specific special needs and has two pre-kindergarten classes at Maxwell High School of Technology, where some of the teachers are high school students in the early childhood education career program.
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