Issue Position: Pre-K Education

Issue Position

Six out of 10 low-income children in Utah are not ready in literacy standards when they start kindergarten. The Utah School Readiness Initiative provides pre-kindergarten education for at-risk kids. 93 percent of the children who have participated in the program have avoided special education, resulting in $1.7 million in savings for taxpayers. This is the type of program that deserves more support from our legislature. It's fiscally responsible. More importantly, it puts these children in a position for educational success.

I am also a huge supporter of the UPSTART program. UPSTART is an in-home, technology-delivered kindergarten readiness program that gives preschool aged children individualized reading, math and science instruction with a focus on reading. In Utah, UPSTART is publicly funded to help children prepare to enter kindergarten. As part of that program, the state requires an independent evaluation of UPSTART each year. Every year, an external evaluation conducted by the Evaluation and Training Institute (ETI) has found UPSTART children showed significantly stronger learning rates on two well-known reading tests than children in a control group.

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