The transition from pre-K to kindergarten can be overwhelming for many children, as they face longer school days, more structured learning and trickier social dynamics. In one study from Ohio State University, kindergarten teachers reported that more than 70% of their students experienced transition challenges in at least one area — making friends, following schedules, meeting academic demands, working within groups or being organized — and more than 30% had difficulty in all five areas.

Much of the response to these challenges has focused on expanding access to preschool and improving program quality. David Jacobson is an early childhood education researcher and director of the Education Development Center’s First 10 initiative, a nationwide program that engages elementary schools, districts, early childhood programs and community organizations to support children and families. Jacobson says such investments are necessary but not enough. He believes the key to a smoother transition into kindergarten lies in better collaboration and coordination among elementary schools, early learning programs, health care providers, social services and families. 

Jacobson spoke to EdSurge about how a more connected approach can help young children navigate this major shift.

EdSurge: What does the current pre-K to kindergarten transition landscape look like, and where are the challenges?

David Jacobson: In most communities across the United States, there are gaps and disconnects between early childhood — Head Start, state-funded pre-K, community-based pre-K — and K-12. Frequently there are even gaps between district pre-K and the K-5 or K-6 buildings. Even within buildings, pre-K is often surprisingly disconnected from the rest of the elementary school. That’s even more the case when pre-K is outside the building.

Many of our preschools and K-12 schools aren’t as connected to health and social services as we would like. So programs operate in isolation and families experience a maze of services. Very typically, services exist in a community, but families don’t know about them or how to access them.

For children, these gaps and disconnects mean abrupt transitions and a lack of alignment. Learning experiences aren’t aligned. They’re not reinforced. They don’t build on each other.

And behind the scenes, the educators don’t know each other. Often, principals don’t know the directors of their feeder preschools. They don’t necessarily know their names, or if they do, they don’t have relationships. And pre-K and kindergarten teachers are disconnected, even though those pre-K children are all going into those kindergarten classrooms. 

It’s really helpful for kindergarten teachers to know about pre-K, and equally helpful for pre-K teachers to understand kindergarten. They want to be connected and set children up for success, but that is not the status quo. They typically don’t have those opportunities.

Why is better pre-K to kindergarten alignment so beneficial for families?

Children benefit when their experiences are safe, stable and connected — connected across the day, across settings and across years. What children experience in the morning should connect with what they do in an after-school program. What they learn in kindergarten should build on what they learned in pre-K, and pre-K should prepare children for kindergarten in a developmentally appropriate way. When experiences are connected, children feel more secure, learning is reinforced — which is really important — and families encounter a system that makes sense. From this vantage point, if you’re a district, it’s really important to recognize that a child’s learning does not begin on the first day of kindergarten.

Additionally, communities are critical units of change. Community conditions shape children’s outcomes independent of the socioeconomic circumstances of individual families. Research shows that communities characterized by greater trust, social cohesion and connection do better across a wide range of outcomes, such as child health, safety and civic engagement.

Taken together, those two principles make a strong case for coordinated action across schools, early childhood programs, health and social services, libraries and families — in contrast to the current, fragmented status quo.

Why does the status quo exist the way it does?

We have always made a sharp distinction between education and care. We say young children need care, but we don’t really think of that as education. By the same token, we sometimes think that K-12 provides education but not care. In fact, we need learning and care from before birth all the way through our lives. So, I think we’ve had an artificial distinction between early childhood and K-12 education.

That has to do with cultural understanding, but also with funding streams. In the United States, we have very fragmented local early childhood systems — known as mixed-delivery systems. We have all these different providers and funding streams, and they’re not coordinated. Head Start has a federal funding stream. There’s state-funded pre-K. There may be child care vouchers for early childhood programs that serve low-income families. Maybe the district has pre-K. Combine those structural factors with that cultural understanding, and you have big gaps.

Another factor is that over the past few decades, school districts have come to think vertically about improvement. If students are struggling in ninth grade, school leaders may look at the structures and supports in ninth grade, but they’ll also look to middle school. If students are struggling in middle school, they’ll look at the first year of middle school, but also at the end of elementary school.

So, think about that cascade vertically: businesses looking to community colleges, looking to high schools, to middle schools, to elementary schools — and then it kind of stops. I refer to this as “the final vertical leap.” We make all these other leaps, at least theoretically. But this one is a natural challenge. These pre-K programs aren’t part of the district. Leaders may know less about their curriculum and practices, and they may not know the directors or the teachers.

That’s where hubs and zones come in. They help districts make that final vertical leap into early childhood. They create the structures, mechanisms and relationships that make that leap easier.

Explain hubs and zones. What do they look like? How do they operate?

An early childhood zone brings together multiple elementary schools, the early childhood programs that feed into them and relevant community providers, such as health and social service agencies, within a defined geography — a small district, for example, or a neighborhood in a larger city.

A hub organizes similar work around a single elementary school and its nearby early childhood and community partners. One way to think about it is that we’re extending the idea of a full-service community school down to include nearby young children and families.

Are there areas of the country or pilots where hubs or zones have been implemented?

Alabama, for instance, currently has 14 hubs across the state. Many of them are in rural settings, but there are also very urban hubs in Montgomery and Mobile, and a couple of suburban ones. I would say Alabama has really taken the hub concept and run with it.

Likewise, I would point to Maine, which also has a lot of rural communities. The state Department of Education supported six hubs across the state. In Sanford, Maine, a community where more than 50% of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, they have taken this idea and run with it in a very powerful way.

Conestoga Valley, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is another small community that has really run with the idea. Conestoga Valley is rural on one end and more urban on the other. More than 50 languages are spoken, and it’s the third lowest-income district in the county.

I would also point to York, Pennsylvania, which is a more urban context — a dense urban area where 90% to 95% of students receive free or reduced-price lunch. What’s a little more unusual there is that they’ve embraced both zones and hubs in the same city. They have a citywide zone with citywide strategies, as well as individual hubs.

In York, they’ve done a really interesting early math initiative, taking advantage of several years of building cross-sector collaboration around the transition to kindergarten, play-and-learn groups and joint professional learning. They implemented a citywide early math initiative where Head Start teachers, community-based pre-K teachers, district pre-K teachers, kindergarten teachers and even first- and second-grade teachers are all using the same set of face-to-face early math games to support math learning and sharing those games with families to play at home. That’s an example of the zone being the platform for a communitywide early math initiative.

What would you tell an administrator, or someone leading a pre-K or early childhood program, who wants to start something similar?

I think step one is that you need some initial leadership buy-in. You can build on that — you can have success and then build greater buy-in — but you need some initial leadership buy-in, certainly from the district, and from at least a couple of your early childhood programs.

Then, you want to look at assets and needs. What are we currently doing, and how is it working? To what extent are we collaborating? What programs and services are available in our community for young children? What are the current connections between early childhood programs and elementary schools?

Rather than planning forever, my suggestion is to begin with some starter practices to get collaboration going and then build on it. Collaboration yields more collaboration.

It’s important to think about the transition to kindergarten not only as the support we provide directly to children and families — those are crucially important, and we want to beef those up — but also what’s happening behind the scenes. How are our educators collaborating? Are they looking at standards together? Are they looking at the curriculum together? Are they looking at instructional challenges together and sharing best practices?

I always say that the same one year that separates kindergarten from first grade, or first grade from second, is the same one year that separates pre-K from kindergarten. That means those teachers should be collaborating as well. And when they do, they find it really inspiring, motivating and helpful. Then there’s an opportunity to get libraries and other community organizations involved.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.