Equity Indicator - Preschool Attendance
Introduction
This equity indicator, Preschool Attendance, examines if an incoming kindergarten student attended preschool before starting their educational journey in the Wissahickon schools. This information is gathered at the time of kindergarten registration, and currently does not distinguish between any alleged or confirmed differences in the quality of one preschool program vs. another. It is only tracked if preschool was or was not attended.
Young children benefit from experiences that help them acclimate to a “school” setting, environment and routine before they start their first year in an full-day, school-year kindergarten program such as the one offered in Wissahickon. While academics are helpful, the focus of the preschool experience need not be “academic” for it to be valuable. In addition to possibly learning numbers and letters and being exposed to books and other “academic” flavored things, students benefit, possibly even more so, from experiencing a social environment, i.e., learning how to do simple things like sit on a carpet for a few minutes, play nicely in the sandbox, etc.) As a result, a quality preschool experience sets the stage very nicely, both academically AND socially, for kindergarten, so that students can hit the ground running as they begin their K-12 years in the local public school system.
As the historical data below shows, other than the data from the most recent year (2022-23), there is a significant, repeating gap when it comes to Hispanic students. The data will be monitored closely in years to come to see if the most recent year was a blip or the start of a new trend. It is important to note that, currently, we do not discern between the quality or frequency of a preschool program, treating all the programs the same. While it would be difficult to make distinctions between preschool programs for a number of reasons, this might be an area for data collection expansion/refinement in the future, perhaps shining a useful light on differences, if there are any, on the totality of the preschool experience.
Current Update: November 2023
Action Plan
This plan is under construction.
Equity Indicator - Preschool Attendance
In this table and chart, the data are represented as percentages of incoming kindergarteners who attended preschool before starting in Wissahickon schools. To interpret these data, an example is: in the 2018-2019 school year, 85.71% of Black kindergarten students attended preschool before enrolling in Wissahickon schools.
| 2018-19 | 2019-20 | 2020-21 | 2021-22 | 2022-23 | 2023-24 | 2024-25 | |
| Asian | 90.77% | 92.00% | 100.00% | 82.76% | 88.00% | 93.48% | 97.83% |
| Black | 85.71% | 92.68% | 73.33% | 87.50% | 90.91% | 86.96% | 93.10% |
| Hispanic | 68.18% | 75.00% | 85.71% | 66.67% | 93.33% | 46.15% | 95.45% |
| Multi-Racial | 84.00% | 94.29% | 92.31% | 90.91% | 93.75% | 86.67% | 87.50% |
| White | 95.56% | 96.48% | 94.61% | 86.96% | 97.22% | 97.75% | 97.06% |
| All Students | 91.75% | 94.09% | 94.10% | 86.11% | 95.13% | 93.73% | 96.00% |
