Posted: Jan. 12, 2010

Muskego — A limited pilot kindergarten for 4-year-olds squeaked through the Muskego-Norway School Board on a 4-3 vote Monday.

A parent information night will be held in February and the pilot program will start this fall.

School officials guess that some 320 4-year-olds will be eligible to enroll. But there will only be room for 160 in the first year and 240 the second year with full implementation planned after that. A lottery system will be used to choose which children will get to attend the pilot K4.

To offer the program, the district worked out agreements with four Muskego area preschools for the pilot after inviting all to participate.

The board will evaluate the actual financial impact during the first year and will look at that again and at academic improvement during the second year. The program could be dropped after the first year.

Much of the $250,000 start-up costs will indirectly come from federal funds. The rest will come from another fund or possibly from fund balance.

Too many unanswered questions

Officials said the K4 program will more than pay for itself by attracting additional state school aid dollars. The aid in excess of the actual K4 cost could be used to help pay for other programs, they said.

The program passed with School Board members Brett Hyde, Dean Strom, Rick Petfalski and Lisa Warwick voting for it and School Board President James Schaefer and board members Eric Schroeder and Michael Serdynski voting against.

Schaefer said his objection was based in the belief that providing kindergarten for 4-year-olds is not the role of government.

"Government should provide services people can't provide for themselves," he said. And right now, many Muskego residents already send their children to preschools, he said.

Serdynski said he voted against K4 because there were too many unanswered questions. He did not see the objectives and guidelines he was looking for, he said.

Schroeder cast his "no" vote because he did not like the funding plan for the start-up cost. He would rather have used federal stimulus money and did not feel that option was pushed hard enough.

The administration had concluded that stimulus money could not be used for K4 start-up costs, based on research and correspondence with the state Department of Public Instruction officials and with school officials across the state.

But Schroeder said no school district has used or attempted to use stimulus money.

"Maybe it was a lack of coming forward," he said. A district might have been successful, if it had pushed, he said.

Adding K4 keeps district competitive

Arguments put forward in favor of the program include that it is good for children academically and it will help ease projected deficits in future budgets because of the additional state aid. It also will help the district compete with other school districts, most of which offer K4. Officials said many parents are looking for districts that have K4.

But resident Karl Jeske of Linda Court said the additional state aid dollars may never come. The state is in financial turmoil, he said, and might well cut school aid.

But even if that happened, Superintendent Joseph Schroeder said the schools would be in better shape with K4 than without it. That is because K4 boosts enrollment figures on which school aid is based.

But Andrew Lewandowski of Parker Drive predicted that the program would help create "a cesspool of possible taxes."

The district will contract with four preschools, three of which are in the northern part of Muskego, which also is where most people live, Schroeder said. The schools are Kids Kampus, W18473 Enterprise Drive; Mary Linsmeier Schools, W18426 Janesville Road; Leaps and Bounds, S7779 Racine Ave.; and Little VIP, 6710 S. Loomis Road, Wind Lake.