CONCORD, California — Aylah Levy had some catching up to do this fall when she entered first grade.
After spending her kindergarten year in an alternative program that took place exclusively outdoors, Aylah, 6, had to adjust to life in a classroom. She knew only a handful of numbers and did not print her letters clearly. To help her get started, her Bay Area elementary school teacher showed her how to properly hold a pencil.
“It's harder. Much, much harder,” Aylah said of the new grip.
Still, her mother, Hannah Levy, says skipping kindergarten was the right decision. She wanted Aylah to enjoy being a child. There is plenty of time, she reasoned, for her daughter to develop study skills.
The number of kindergarten students in public schools dropped during the COVID-19 pandemic. Concerned about the virus or wanting to avoid online school, hundreds of thousands of families have postponed the start of school for their young children. Most have returned to school in some form, but even three years after the pandemic school closures, kindergarten enrollment continues to lag.
Some parents, like Levy, don't see much value in traditional preschool. For others, it's a matter of keeping children in other childcare arrangements that better suit their lifestyle. And for many, kindergarten is simply no longer the supposed first step in a child's formal education, another sign of how the pandemic and online learning have upended the American school system.
Preschool is considered a crucial year in which children learn to follow directions, regulate behavior, and become accustomed to learning. Missing that school year can put children at a disadvantage, especially those from low-income families and families whose first language is not English, said Deborah Stipek, former dean of Stanford University's Graduate School of Education. These children sometimes lag behind in recognizing letters and counting to 10 before they go to school, she says.
But for some parents, that foundation seems less urgent after the pandemic. For many, kindergarten just doesn't seem to work in their lives.
Students who withdrew during the pandemic school closures have returned to schools. But kindergarten enrollment remained 5.2% lower in the 2022-2023 school year than in the 2019-2020 school year, according to an Associated Press analysis of state-level data. Public school enrollment fell 2.2% across all grades.
Kindergarten represents a huge change in the lifestyle of some families. After years of all-day childcare, they suddenly have to arrange afternoon care with limited and expensive after-school care options. Some worry that their child is not ready for the structure and behavioral expectations of a public school classroom. And many think that what their child misses in school can be quickly learned in first grade.
Christina Engram was set to send her daughter Nevaeh to kindergarten at her neighborhood school in Oakland this fall, until she learned her daughter would not have a spot in the after-school program there. That meant she had to be picked up at 2:30 most afternoons.
“If I put her in public school, I would have to cut back on my hours, and I would essentially not have a good income for me and my children,” said Engram, a kindergarten teacher and mother of two.
Engram decided to keep Nevaeh in a child care center for another year. Engram receives a government child care subsidy that allows her to pay for full-time child care or preschool until her child is six and needs to enroll in first grade.
Compared to kindergarten, she thought her daughter would likely receive extra attention in daycare, where more adults work per child.
“She knows her numbers. She knows her ABCs. She knows how to spell her name,” Engram said. “But when she feels frustrated because she can't do something, her frustration overwhelms her. She needs extra attention and care. She is somewhat shy when she thinks she is going to give the wrong answer.
In California, where kindergarten is not mandatory, enrollment for that grade fell 10.1% between the 2019-2020 school year and the 2021-2022 school year. Enrollment appeared to rebound the following school year, growing more than 5% in fall 2022, but that may have been inflated by the state's expansion of transitional kindergarten — a class before kindergarten available to older four-year-olds. The state Department of Education has not disclosed how many children were regular kindergarteners last school year, as opposed to transitional students.
Many future preschoolers are among the tens of thousands of families who have turned to homeschooling.
Some parents say they stumbled into homeschooling almost by accident. Convinced their family wasn't ready for “school,” they kept their five-year-old home and then discovered they needed more structure. They bought some activities or a curriculum – and the homeschooling stuck.
Others chose to homeschool preschoolers after watching older children in traditional schools. Jenny Almazan homeschools Ezra, 6, after taking his sister Emma, 9, out of a school in Chino, California.
“She rushed home from school, ate dinner, did an hour or two of schoolwork, showered and went to bed. She didn't get time to be a kid,” Almazan said. Almazan also worried about school shootings and the pressure her children might face at school to act or dress a certain way.
To make it all work, Almazan quit her job as a kindergarten teacher. Most days the children learn outdoors, playing in the park, visiting museums or even doing math while running errands.
“My kids don't miss anything because they're not in public school,” she said. “Every child has different needs. I'm not saying public school is bad. It's not. But for us this fits.”
Preschool is important for all children, but especially for those who don't attend kindergarten or who haven't had much exposure to math, reading and other subjects, said Steve Barnett, co-director of the National Institute for Early Education Research and a professor at Rutgers University.
“The question really is, if you didn't go to kindergarten, what did you do instead?,” he said.
Hannah Levy chose Berkeley Forest School to start her daughter's education, in part because she appreciated how teachers infused subjects like science with lessons about nature. She envisioned the traditional preschool as a place where children sit indoors at a desk, doing worksheets and having few play experiences.
“I learned about nature. We learned in a different way,” says daughter Aylah.
But the lure of a suburban school system had drawn the family from San Francisco, and when it came time for first grade, Aylah enrolled at Cornell Elementary in Albany.
Early this fall, Levy recalled, Aylah came home with a project where each first-grade student had a page in a book to write about who they were. Some pages had only scribbles and others had legible printing. She said Aylah fell somewhere in the middle.
“It was interesting to me because this was the moment where I thought, 'What would it be like if she was in kindergarten?'” she said.
During a conversation with Levy, Aylah's teacher said she was working with the girl on her writing, but there were no other concerns. “She said that everything Aylah was behind on, she's caught up to the point where she would never recognize that Aylah didn't go to Cornell for kindergarten either,” Levy said.
Levy said she feels good about Aylah's attitude toward school, although she misses the idea of being outside of nature.
This also applies to Ayla.
“I miss my friends and being outside,” she said. “I also miss my favorite teacher.”
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Lurye reported from New Orleans and Stavely from Oakland. Daniel J. Willis of EdSource contributed from Concord.
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This article was published in collaboration with EdSource. EdSource is a nonprofit newsroom based in California covering equal opportunity in education through in-depth analysis and data-driven journalism.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Overdeck Family Foundation for reporting focused on early learning. The AP is solely responsible for all content.