From Doorsteps to Classrooms: CCISD\u2019s effort to reconnect students with education<\/a><\/p>\nDistrict leaders say pre-K enrollment has jumped 214 percent over the last four years. They credit new legislation offering free enrollment to district employees and say while those spots are filling up fast and the numbers all sound positive, they\u2019re still not where they want to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur rooms are maxed out, so I have 22 in my classroom right now,\u201d said Cathy Muniz, a pre-K teacher at Travis Elementary.<\/p>\n
She says the district\u2019s unprecedented growth in pre-K enrollment has come with some unintended side effects.<\/p>\n
A district chart shows where enrollment started six years ago \u2014 with about 840 students. Today, that number is just over 2,500.<\/p>\n
Muniz says that number shows things are moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would say there’s a big need. Even now, I feel like there are probably still more students that need to come in here, but we\u2019re full,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
CCISD Early Childhood Specialist Amy Lavigne says that while the district is seeing steady growth, there are still more students to reach \u2014 and plenty of room to welcome them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe currently have 116 seats available, but based on our enrollment, what we\u2019ve done is we have another FTE available. If we need to, we would open up another classroom,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
CCISD Superintendent Roland Hernandez spoke at this week\u2019s board meeting about a study conducted years ago to help drive the district\u2019s enrollment initiative.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey did a heat map for school districts and schools showing how many they have enrolled versus how many kids we had out there in our community. And at that point we saw it, we were like, wow \u2014 we have way too many kids who should be in pre-K who are not getting registered,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
But even as they work to fill those seats, Lavigne says they\u2019re seeing positive learning trends, especially in reading and math.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had 19 percent more students that were on level. So if they attended our pre-K program, there are 45 percent more students that were on level,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Muniz says regardless of how full the class may get, the lessons will always go back to step one.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust the basic foundation \u2014 their letters, the recognition, the sounds that they make, putting them together by syllable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CCISD\u2019s pre-K enrollment has grown 214% in four years, with teachers seeing big gains in early reading and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-1781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}