Our partnership with BVSD prepared more students for Kindergarten
One of the magical ingredients to our work is our partnership with the Boulder Valley School District. We’re much stronger when we work together, and our Kinder Bridge program is a prime example.
Why we became a champion for early learning
Preparing students for that all-important first year of formal schooling allows us to address opportunity gaps facing our youngest learners. The BVSD community is diverse in many ways, welcoming students from different races, cultures, economic and family backgrounds.
Because we know school readiness can impact everything from reading at grade level to graduating high school to being career ready later in life, Impact on Education partnered with Boulder Housing Partners over six years ago to start offering a summer program that provided high quality early learning experiences to preschool age students heading to BVSD. In 2022 this program was woven into BVSD’s summer learning, allowing us to serve four times the number of students and provide 50% more instructional hours.
What Kinder Bridge offers students
This past summer, 170 rising Kindergarten students with identified risk factors participated in our Kinder Bridge program. These students wouldn’t have otherwise had access to summer preschool and would have arrived in our kindergarten classrooms less prepared than their peers. The new partnership allowed us to:
- Increase the number of students served, enrolling 170 preschoolers from 30 schools at three sites in Boulder and Lafayette
- Enroll 40% Free and Reduced Price Meals (FRPM) students
- Provide BVSD transportation to make the program accessible to all students
- Double instructional hours, providing 80 hours of instruction focusing on letter recognition, counting, letter sound formation and recognition, name-writing, executive functioning and social emotional skills
The impact of the 2022 Kinder Bridge program
While many students were already demonstrating Kindergarten-level behaviors at the beginning of the summer, all students saw growth on the BVSD TS-Gold Kindergarten Readiness Assessment, and 65% left the program within the expected range of a kindergartener one month into the school year. The greatest gains were in identifying letter-sound correspondences and taking care of their own needs appropriately.
Class attendance averaged 86% across the three sites and 92% of families indicated plans to enroll their students in BVSD Kindergarten.
Looking ahead to 2023 we’ll continue working closely and proactively with BVSD to improve and enroll students in our Kinder Bridge program.
*The BVSD TS-Gold Kindergarten Readiness Assessment measures literacy/letter recognition, numeracy/number recognition and counting, and executive functioning skills necessary to engage productively and positively in a kindergarten class.
BEFORE YOU GO …
Impact on Education is a nonprofit organization, and we depend on our community to help us put our mission into action. We need your help to to provide opportunity and resources to 30,000 students and 4,000 educators in the Boulder Valley School District.
