ECTOR COUNTY, Texas — Ector County ISD's Kindergarten Readiness score is 57% for the Fall of 2022. This score is 11 points higher than last year's score and 24% points higher than two years ago.
"The reason we're able to go from 33 to 57 is because of what happens before kindergarten, it's pre-K. Doubling the amount of time kids spends in 4-year-old pre-K has made a difference," said Dr. Scott Muri, ECISD Superintendent.
Pre-K 4 teacher Lina Hernandez has had the chance to see tremendous growth amongst the students in her class this school year. It's growth that the district credits to ECISD's investment and improvements in the Pre-K 3 and 4-year old programs.
"Seeing the huge growth already at 9 weeks I was amazed by the data that these kids are already knowing their uppercase, their lowercase and their sounds, and usually we see that at March," said Hernandez.
She said in her class students are excelling when it comes to Kindergarten readiness. Academically they can recognize letters, count and identify words. Even socially they're prepared by being able to collaborate with one another.
"We group them up together and they mirror each other, they see it and that's peer play," she said. "We have kids that come in without any vocabulary at the beginning of the year. And we don't really throw them into speech, we want to get them exposed to other children that have that language and throughout the year you'll see that vocabulary just gets pulled out, they learn."
Mrs. Hernandez strongly feels that her students are well prepared for the next level.
"I absolutely feel by the time they get to kindergarten they have those skills in place and the behaviors are minimal," said Hernandez.