José Manuel Guzmán was playing at Mountain View Park with his kids on Tuesday morning. One of them went to transitional kindergarten, or TK, and he said it made a lasting difference.
“My kid, who’s barely in third grade, he knows how to multiply,” Guzmán said. “He knows how to multiply things I don’t know how to multiply thanks to TK.”
The San Diego Unified School District’s TK program is open to all kids who turn four by Sept. 1. Guzmán said some parents might think they should wait until kindergarten before enrolling their kids in school.
“They don’t realize that TK is actually preparing them for kindergarten,” Guzmán said. “When they don’t do that, they struggle when they’re in kindergarten, because all the kids that went are way ahead of them.”
District leaders want parents to know about those benefits. Marceline Sciuto, the district’s senior director of operations support, said TK is the first part of a two-year kindergarten program.
“It gets the students more prepared for an academic program,” she said. “It’s still rich with play and exploration and socializing, but they're learning school behaviors, learning important skills like how to share, how to collaborate, how to sit in one spot and listen to the teacher.”
Along with the academic and social benefits for kids, it can also be a financial help for families. It’s free, the district’s TK students are there for a full day and they get breakfast and lunch at school.
School starts on Aug. 12, and there are nearly 550 TK spots still available. The district says most are in the Lincoln, Crawford, Hoover, Logan Memorial and Morse school clusters.
“A lot of our clusters in those communities have more multi-family dwelling units, apartment buildings and condos, where perhaps families are a little more mobile,” Sciuto said. “If there’s more mobility, then parents tend, in general, to enroll a little bit later.”
Parents interested in enrolling their child in TK can visit their resident school to complete a packet. They’ll need to bring the child’s birth certificate, immunization records and proof of residence.
And if kids aren’t ready for a full school day — without a nap time — qualifying families can apply for the district’s part-day preschool program.
