At the Abraham Lincoln School in Bangor, Kathryn Griffith’s classroom buzzed with the voices of Bangor’s youngest students.
Griffith is one of the school’s two prekindergarten teachers, but her classroom isn’t filled with desks and worksheets. It’s equipped with a kitchen that’s the perfect size for a 4-year-old’s imagination to take hold. There’s a large table filled with sand that games are projected onto from up above. Tables are filled with art supplies and books.
“I knew this piece goes right here,” one student said on March 1 as he looked at a puzzle in front of him, explaining how he matched the illustration of the dragonfly on the puzzle piece to the picture on the box.
“Then I put it together,” his friend said.
Working with one another while playing is what pre-K is all about, Griffith said. The three students putting together the puzzle had never worked on it before, she said, but they picked it up in about five minutes.
The 2023-2024 school year marks the first that all public elementary schools in Bangor have full-day, rather than half-day, pre-K programs. Now more than halfway through the year, school staff said they are already seeing a remarkable difference in student progress.
The full-day program marks the culmination of years of work. Despite initial trepidation from residents and some School Committee members, Superintendent James Tager said full-day pre-K has become popular among Bangor students and their parents.
“It’s an educational program. And I always say that, but it involves a lot of play. And so it’s really taken off,” he said. “It gives kids some real-world experiences, and it also gives them additional background knowledge because it’s their first time to be in school.”
Last year, Maine enshrined in state law its goal to have all public school districts offer universal access to pre-K programs by the 2026-2027 school year. That means they must have room for all children in a specific school district, though they can offer either half- or full-day programs.
In Bangor, former Superintendent Betsy Webb established that goal more than a decade ago. Tager also included the goal of expanding full-day pre-K to all schools in the district by 2030 as part of his 10-year strategic plan, released in 2020.
Bangor rolled out its full-day pre-K program through three phases, starting first at Vine Street School, then expanding to Downeast School and Abraham Lincoln School. Now those schools, along with Fourteenth Street and Fruit Street schools, have full-day pre-K classes.
The school department expanded gradually to learn as it went, said Ray Phinney, a spokesperson for the school department.
It also wanted to avoid adding too many new expenses to the school budget. However, funding in the form of grants from the state and federal government helped move up the timeline.
With the expansion, the school department hired three new pre-K teachers for the current school year, which cost about $160,000. That’s less than 1 percent of the district’s total $24.4 million budget for regular instruction.
After the district saw a decline in pre-K enrollment following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of students in Bangor’s program grew to 138 kids this year.
At first, some parents in Bangor were skeptical of all-day pre-K because they worried their children would be sitting behind desks all day, or that it would be too much for them, Tager said. But kids have rest time, he said, and people will hardly ever see a desk in Bangor’s pre-K classrooms.
Students get education in core subjects, including language arts, math and science, but in ways that make sense to kids. Students are not graded on a typical A-F scale. Instead, they’re assessed on whether they are making progress toward a number of education standards.
What’s more, full-day pre-K has led to students learning to read, write and communicate complex ideas more quickly, he said. The students have made significant progress in developing basic life skills, such as learning to share and being part of a community, largely through play, which studies have shown is essential for healthy brain development and can even contribute to academic skills.
“There’s learning going on, but there’s a lot of play,” Tager said. “The kids are happy, the parents are happy, and the community is happy.”
Vine Street School, which started full-day pre-K in September 2021, has had the program the longest. Students there are turning out to be higher-achieving learners, often able to start reading by the end of the school year, Phinney said.
“Students at the end of pre-K, going into kindergarten, are at a remarkably higher level than the kindergarten [teachers] were seeing beforehand,” he said. “And it continued for two years in a row.”
The curriculum was developed in partnership with a company from Finland and designed around hands-on learning experiences, Tager said.
“I was in a room last week, and kids were measuring the furniture with pieces of yarn. At Vine [Street School], they have a Starbucks kitchen setup with the logos and everything, and the kids are pretending they’re making coffee and breakfast,” Tager said.
Fourteenth Street School Principal Kristi Lord said her pre-K students often get a small lesson, and then there will be a hands-on, play-based activity to reinforce what was just taught. They are learning how to work together and problem solve.
“They might have a kitchen, so a student can go up and [pretend] to order food, and the other student might have a menu, or they might be able to write their order down in their way while the other student prepares it,” she said.
Pre-K gives students a good impression of school that will be important for years to come, she said.
“That positive experience right off the bat just feeds forward into the other school year experiences,” Lord said. “The kids are just smiling when they get off the bus. They love being here. They love their teacher. They love everything that they do during the day.”
BDN investigative reporter Sawyer Loftus may be reached at [email protected].