THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 10, 1995 TAG: 9512070174
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ronald L. Speer
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
Most folks, I think, consider me an optimist - or maybe just a slow learner.
My son has always put me in the second category.
``Dad, you get up every morning singing, and every night you come dragging home,'' he used to say when he was a lad and I was a reporter writing about the seamier sides of life. ``But the next morning you get up singing again. You just don't seem to learn.''
He was right, generally. Most times I think the good outweighs the bad, even in the harshest of places and the worst of times.
But last week I read something that has sent a chill down my spine that I haven't been able to shake.
What bothered me was staff writer Perry Parks' story out of Elizabeth City about a study educators did of kindergarten pupils' preparedness for school.
The results were depressing.
Some of the kindergarteners had no idea what a reading lesson was, and viewed books as strange objects.
Others had so little preparedness for life that they didn't realize that they could get hurt if they fell from the top of a slide.
And in the most chilling finding of all: Some didn't even know their names.
What kind of a life has a child led that at the age of 5 she doesn't know her name?
Or has never enjoyed the exhilirating thrill of plunging down a playground slide?
Or has never been exposed to the delights of stories that are written down and passed from generation to generation?
Oh, there is a brighter side. The study showed that four out of five kindergarten students were mostly ready to learn to read and write and play and get ready to one day become educated men and women.
But one of every five just wasn't capable of competing with his 5-year-old peers.
That means that in a typical kindergarten class, four or five kids haven't the foggiest idea of why they are there and what they are supposed to be doing.
And if they're out of the game before they even start, there's little likelihood that those four or five innocent kids will be around at graduation.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out where the unprepared kids are coming from.
Across the country, kids who themselves haven't graduated from high school - or grade school - are giving birth.
Not many 13- or 14-year-old parents are going to read to their toddlers, or take them to the park or tell them how exciting the learning process can be.
Most of those child-parents are poor. Many of them care more about drugs than they do about their offspring. Still others, who do care about what happens to their kids, may be overprotecting them from the nasty world just outside the door in the troubled neighborhoods of America.
The numbers of child-parents are growing, and I worry that what the Elizabeth City educators found is the beginning of an avalanche.
My fears are eased slightly by what the educators in Elizabeth City are trying to do to help the troubled kindergarteners, such as studying the preparedness level of all 526 of them in the district.
Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools Superintendent Joe Peel said the data will be shared with the entire community in an attempt to help parents understand the problems and help find solutions.
``We need to, some kind of way, get out into the community,'' said Beverly Thomas, a kindergarten teacher at Pasquotank Elementary who helped develop the readiness test.
I salute people like Beverly Thomas and others trying desperately to give those unprepared kids a shot at success.
But we'll have to do something to keep babies from having babies before I'll feel much like singing again when I think of school. by CNB