Dozens of 4-year-olds meandered their way to the front of the room at the Guadalupe Center, barely watching where they were going as they turned to look for their parents, grandparents and teachers in the audience. Soon, their little voices rang out loudly as the pre-kindergarten students sang a song about shining their lights all around.
It was their day, in a way: All in for Early Learning Day at the Guadalupe Center’s von Otterloo Campus for Learning, its newest of five Immokalee locations serving 550 children from infancy to age 5.
About 100 of them are in voluntary pre-K, a program with the specified aim of getting children ready for kindergarten.
On Monday, their teachers and parents and members of various preschool-interested nonprofits had gathered to celebrate the statewide early learning day and the Guadalupe Center in particular.
There was a lot to celebrate. Whereas only 44 percent of Florida’s youngest students are “kindergarten-ready” – as tested within the first 30 days of kindergarten – the Guadalupe Center pre-K logs a 93 percent ready rate.
That’s so many percentage points ahead of Southwest Florida county totals for all kindergarten students, including those who had not been to pre-K.
As of the 2024-2025 school year, just 38 percent of Lee County students who took the FAST (Florida Assessment of Student Thinking) test were deemed ready. Collier County fared a bit better at a 46 percent ready rate, followed closely by Manatee and Charlotte counties at 45 percent. Compare that, though, with just 28 percent in Okeechobee County and 16 percent of last year’s kindergarteners in DeSoto County being ready for school.
Those numbers are unfortunately not news.
Even though Florida was one of the first states in the country to offer free prekindergarten for all 4-year-olds regardless of family income beginning in 2005-2006, the numbers don’t signal much success.
There are inherent problems in the system. With VPK lasting only half a day at most, many parents struggle to juggle jobs and usually end up paying for childcare the other half of the day. As family budgets tighten, the youngest members sometimes suffer.
Subsequently, just 66 percent of Florida 4-year-olds were enrolled in VPK in 2024-2025, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, compared with a record high of 80 percent a decade ago.
“Early Learning is about children. It's also about families,” Heather Siskind of nonprofit, nonpartisan Children’s Movement of Florida told those gathered at the Guadalupe Center. “It's about communities and Florida's economy. Families can't work if they can't find or afford childcare. Across Florida, 70% of households with young children have both of those parents who work find that they have these childcare challenges.”
Those challenges show up in the readiness numbers, which have been determined by a changing roster of tests in recent years. Most recently, kindergarten readiness has been determined by the FAST test.
The FAST test was first implemented in the 2022-2023 academic year. It was preceded by the Florida Kindergarten Readiness Screener, used from 2017 through 2021 to determine early literacy and numeracy skills. Before that, kindergarten readiness was determined by the FAIR (Florida Assessment for Instruction in Reading) and the Work Sampling System, focusing on early literacy and developmental skills. Due to technical issues and shifts in testing, the state temporarily suspended issuing readiness rates in 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 before adopting the FAST/Star Early Literacy assessment for the 2017-2018 school year.
Going back just to 2017 paints a dismal and worsening picture of kindergarten readiness in Florida.
That year, about 54 percent of kindergarteners were deemed up to par for school. Numbers remained at 53 percent for the next two years, going up to 57 percent in 2020 and declining to 50 percent in 2021.
And the numbers keep falling.
Part of the reason may be that the Florida Department of Education set a higher benchmark for readiness in 2024. Using the higher FAST score, just 44 percent of kindergarteners were ready. (If the previous, lower rate had been used, 52 percent would have been considered ready.)
No matter where the cutoff lies, about half of the students entering kindergarten are not – and haven’t been – ready for school.
Those early years are critical to success throughout a student’s academic life, according to experts.
“By age five, 90% of a child's brain is already developed,” said Siskind. “”Those early years shape how children communicate, how they solve problems, how they manage their emotions and build relationship skills that determine whether they show up to kindergarten ready to learn and stay on track throughout school and into adulthood.”
“Children who arrive at kindergarten ready are more apt to pass the third grade reading test,” said Melanie Stefanowicz, CEO of the state- and federally funded Early Learning Coalition of Southwest Florida. “And you may say, I'm not worried about that today, but I am, because I know if a child doesn't pass the third grade reading test, they're probably not going to graduate from middle school on time.” The Early Learning Coalition is a pass-through agency that handles VPK enrollment and helps low-income parents pay for child care, among other services.
Outside of VPK, which is state-funded, the Guadalupe Center relies on philanthropy for 63 percent of its costs, said CEO Dawn Montecalvo. Other child-care costs are based on a sliding scale, with many receiving assistance.
“If they're kindergarten ready, they're going to be successful throughout their education and be the next strong workforce,” Montecalvo said. “So it's not about just today, but it's about having this conversation for every day and making sure we're building a stronger future for Florida.”
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