What's Best For Children

Springs School officials announced last week that the district will offer a full-day prekindergarten program for students, thanks in part to a state grant for $420,000. This will accommodate a class of over 40 children in its early childhood education program, which will be run on campus by SCOPE.

Springs School is a school district that serves a population largely of middle-class families and is truly the heart of its hamlet, but the district and its taxpayers also are financially burdened by the lack of a real commercial district to offset the cost of public education, and has traditionally paid hefty high school tuition rates to the East Hampton Union Free School District. These are reasons why it has struggled to afford even a half-day prekindergarten program, despite statistics that show the clear benefits of early childhood education.

In 2021, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released its study on long-term effects of Boston’s prekindergarten program. In addition to basic kindergarten readiness, it showed that students who attended prekindergarten were more likely to graduate high school and to enroll in college on time, faced fewer disciplinary problems, and were less likely to be incarcerated as juveniles.

But for a budget-strapped district like Springs, making this option a reality has proved a heavy lift, and for families already contending with a very high cost of living — one that has increased dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic — affording private options was often out of reach.

Now, in what is arguably the school district on the East End that most needed a full-day prekindergarten, it no longer is.