SANDERS:
We've learned through the years that, uh,
when children enter school in kindergarten,
the gap between the children who are struggling,
even at the beginning of the year
or certainly by the middle of their kindergarten year,
the gap between those children
and the children who are already achieving
at what would be considered grade level,
the gap between those two groups of children
is the smallest
during their kindergarten or first grade year.
If you wait longer into second grade, third grade, fourth grade
the gap, even with solid classroom instruction,
the gap between the two groups, it has been proven,
does widen, and so your greatest chance at closing that gap
is early on.
So that, if you intervene in kindergarten
or first grade, you could accelerate their progress
and either close or significantly narrow the gap.
And by doing that, certainly, you're helping the children,
but also, we found through research over the years
in early intervention that that saves school districts money
down the road, and also society
down the road, because then those children do not need help later.
Our, our children who don't learn to read,
perhaps later, those are the children who end up dropping out of school,
so it lowers retention rates,
drop out rates,
has an impact on juvenile delinquency
and can even, over a long haul, impact the, the prison population.