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An online school readiness program brings learning home for Mississippi’s youngest students
This month, Mississippi is wrapping up giving thousands of 5-year-olds their first-ever test — an exam to see whether they’ve developed the early literacy skills they’ll need to succeed in kindergarten.
Most will likely fail, if past trends hold.
Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.
Although more than 20,000 Mississippi children age 5 and under are enrolled in Head Start, and Mississippi legislators have slowly added seats to the state’s highly-rated public preschool program, nearly half of the state’s 4-year-olds do not attend preschool at all, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Data Center.