Pre-Kindergarten 3 Program

Winchester, VA

Implementing a Pilot Pre-Kindergarten 3 Program in Partnership with Winchester Public Schools

  • Looks to address early childhood achievement and opportunity gaps by providing an additional year of high-quality, structured prekindergarten, targeting low-income 3-year olds
  • Will provide 2-years of funding to cover the cost of the primary instructor
  • Classroom will be at John Kerr Elementary School
  • Target population will be WPS families with income ranging from 185-300% of the Federal Poverty Level guidelines
  • Theory of change: These students going through the Pre-K3 program will have two full years of quality pre-kindergarten and thus should demonstrate a higher level of readiness upon entering kindergarten
WPS Prek4 3
WPS Prek4 1
WPS Prek4 2

Measures of Performance

For more information, please see Data Analysis section at the bottom of the page

Data Analysis

  • Goal: To increase access to quality early learning opportunities for economically disadvantaged children.
  • The Winchester Public School Pre-Kindergarten3 (Pre-K3) program is a pilot program designed to offer pre-kindergarten to 3-year old children in the city of Winchester, modeled off of the 4-year old VPI Pre-K4 program. 
  • Intent: We believe we can improve kindergarten readiness by offering two full years of pre-k for up to 18 students per year. We will look to see, in one year, if this Pre-K3 cohort enters Pre-K4 with noted levels of increased capacity as compared to students that did not go through the Pre-K3 program, with assessments in social-emotional and academic performance using the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Virginia Kindergarten Readiness Program (VKRP) to evaluate growth. In two years, we hope to see further growth in overall kindergarten readiness scores, as measured by the VKRP, when these students enter kindergarten.
  • Our sustainability goal is this data will demonstrate that two full years of pre-kindergarten does make a difference, as seen through improved readiness scores. With that data, we are hopeful WPS will see its value and advocate to the School Board for long-term funding of this classroom, and perhaps even increase the number of Pre-K3 classrooms within the public school system.
  • Second-year results:
    1. The classroom has remained full at 18 students for the duration of the program’s first two years, earning a “green” health score.
    2. We saw significant growth in our 3-year-old classroom during its first year, whereby the children scored 10% ready in the fall of 2022 and ended the year 33% meeting benchmarks in the spring 2023, earning a “green” score. The goal for this first year was 25% readiness.