The East Central Kansas Cooperative in Education is looking to expand preschool options in the Baldwin City, Eudora and Wellsville school districts.

Dan Wray, director of the special education cooperative, said the plan would open half-day 3- and 4-year-old preschool classes to more children in the three districts.

Wray said there were two goals: one, to provide more children the opportunity to attend preschool with curriculum designed to prepare them for kindergarten; and two, to create the “least restrictive environments” in classrooms for those children with individualized education plans by placing them with typically developing peers.

The cooperative offers Preschool Enhancement Program classrooms in all three districts for 3- and 4-year-olds identified through screening as having learning difficulties in areas of speech, motor, communication, social or other skills.

Those PEP preschool classes are all that are now available for children younger than 5 in the Eudora and Wellsville districts. Wray said both districts were ready to move forward with the expanded preschool option for the 2017-2018 school year.

The cooperative’s plan is to accept enough typically developing children to have 13 to 15 students next school year in Eudora and Wellsville’s PEP classrooms, Wray said. Eudora now has from nine to 11 students in its four PEP classrooms. The cooperative would hire additional paraprofessionals when necessary to maintain appropriate adult-to-student ratios, he said.

The Baldwin City situation is different in two ways, Wray said; that district has a large enough percentage of single-parent families, teen parents, students receiving free and reduced lunches or other at-risk indicators to qualify for state funding of an at-risk preschool program. It also has an existing large community preschool in the Rainbow Experience Preschool.

Currently, the Baldwin Elementary School Primary Center has three four-day-a-week PEP classrooms for 3- and 4-year-olds, a half-day at-risk 4-year-old classroom and all-day 4-year-old at-risk classroom. The 4-year-old at-risk classrooms are free to qualifying students, but they also accept a number of tuition-based students to provide classroom peers.

Wray said the cooperative’s plan would blend the half-day 4-year-old classroom with the PEP classes and accept more typically developing students to increase enrollment to 12 to 15 students per classroom. The all-day at-risk program would be unchanged.

A complication in blending the PEP and half-day at-risk classrooms is their differing schedules. Wray said the Baldwin City district’s PEP classes meet four days a week while the 4-year-old at-risk classrooms are five days a week so students can receive the 465 hours of instruction the state mandates for the program.

A solution would be to expand the proposed blended classrooms to five days a week, but that issue was still being discussed, Wray said. A decision should be made in the next few weeks, he said.

Another factor in Baldwin City is how the proposal would affect Rainbow Experience Preschool, which offers 3-year-old and 4-year-old preschool classes. Baldwin Elementary School Principal Deb Ehling-Gwin told the Baldwin City school board last month that she didn’t want the expansion to hurt Rainbow.

For his part, Wray maintains it would have little consequences on the 53-year-old Rainbow.

“We’re talking about very few children, and we’re offering very different kinds of products.”

Chelsea Bradbury, Rainbow director, shares that view.

Bradbury said Ehling-Gwin visited with her last week about the proposed changes, and she would update the preschool’s board on the plan at a meeting Thursday. Rainbow currently has 17 3-year-olds and 18 4-year-olds in its preschool programs, but they are offered with all-day and after-school day care options and other programs unavailable at the elementary school, she said.

“We have a very different atmosphere,” she said. “Honestly, I’m not too worried at this point, but I’d have to see what the rates are compared to ours.”

Wray, who served as the Ottawa special education director before taking the ECKCE job last year, said similar concerns were expressed before that district expanded its preschool. The Ottawa preschool program attracted more than enough peer students and only affected the waiting list numbers of private preschools, he said.

There are still details to be put in place, including tuition costs, Wray said. Enrollment for the expanded preschool programs would coincide with the districts’ kindergarten roundups in the spring, he said.