The most important years of a student’s life are not the last ones but the first ones. It’s in kindergarten and even before that the pattern is set that will determine how a child does in academics for the rest of his or her school years.
Thus, it is good news to see that Mississippi’s limited public school pre-kindergarten program is drawing high marks. The state is one of only six that met all the benchmarks of a national early education research organization’s latest evaluation.
The obvious challenge for Mississippi is to figure out a way to expand this successful program to cover a lot more children than present funding allows.
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