Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Preston Park Primary School teacher Marianne Coulter leads her prekindergarten class of 4-year-olds in the Pledge of Allegiance. Studies indicate that prekindergarten programs help children master essential learning skills before they start their regular classroom work.

What do prekindergarten students learn?

Pupils enrolled in Virginia’s prekindergarten programs learn the basic skills that they will be required to know once they reach kindergarten. These include:

• Holding a pencil or a crayon.
• Letters and numbers.
• Calendar skills, such as a basic knowledge of the days of the week.
• An ability to work in a whole class environment, in small groups or individually.
• Sitting quietly and listening.
• Social skills. They learn to play and share.

Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

Preston Park Primary School prekindergarten student Julie Vong, 4, listens with headphones to a teaching program on a computer.

Phyllis Cundiff, in Roanoke, is looking for 4-year-olds.

Sharon Sheppard, in Roanoke County, is looking for space.

Cundiff and Sheppard are in charge of the pre-kindergarten programs for Roanoke and Roanoke County respectively. Each year, they get money from Richmond to help send at-risk 4-year-olds to preschool.

The 12-year-old program, called the Virginia Preschool Initiative, is a favorite of Gov. Tim Kaine's. The governor wants to make preschool available to an additional 7,000 Virginia children over the next two years, at a cost of $56 million. It's part of a plan to expand the program by 17,000 children by 2012.

But area school officials, such as Cundiff and Sheppard, are having difficulty filling the spots that are already available. Every year, as a result, school districts, including these two largest school divisions in Western Virginia, leave state money on the table.

Right now, the Virginia Department of Education sets aside money to help make preschool available to almost 19,000 Virginia 4-year-olds eligible for free lunch. Almost one-third of those spots aren't filled, according to Mark Allan, director for elementary instruction at the department.

Some districts say they can't afford to pay for their share of the pre-kindergarten programs. Other districts, such as Roanoke County, say they don't have enough room in school buildings to serve all of the eligible children.

That has some in the Virginia General Assembly questioning Kaine's proposal.

In Roanoke, which has more at-risk 4-year-olds than anywhere else in the region, city school officials are having a difficult time recruiting eligible children into the program, said Cundiff, the school system's director for exceptional student education.

That's because for "a lot of the preschoolers out there that would be considered high-risk we have problems getting parents to fill out the information and actually come to whatever we set up as sites as far as screening and all that," Cundiff said.

Roanoke is eligible for state funding to help pay for preschool for 524 children. But only 443 are enrolled in the program this school year, Allan said.

Because of the available spots, the school system sometimes enrolls some children who do not meet the city's definition of "at-risk," Cundiff said.

The school system provides transportation, but the school day lasts only five hours, which may be difficult for working parents.

To reach at-risk children, school officials are now planning to go to social service agencies where their families are likely to go, Cundiff said.

"We need to go to them rather than have them come to us," she said.

Roanoke schools also are working on revamping the preschool curriculum and on tracking its preschool graduates. Cundiff said she hopes to roll out the changes in the next school year.

In Roanoke County, which is eligible for funding for 120 children, only 82 students are enrolled.

As much as she would love to sign up more children if Kaine's proposed expansion is approved, Sheppard said it would be difficult to make room for them.

Already, all but one of the county's elementary schools have a pre-kindergarten classroom. Herman L. Horn Elementary in Vinton has two.

"I'm not sure if there are some schools out there that would be able to rearrange and reorganize a classroom," she said.

Some children who do not take part in the state's pre-kindergarten program get similar early childhood education through federal programs such as Head Start or programs for children with disabilities.

Other states have run into similar problems with enrollment, said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

"Georgia is a state that decided that the targeting approach wasn't really accomplishing its objective and decided to offer the program to all kids," he said. "If you really want to reach all of your at-risk population you need a program that's open to all kids. Because those are the only programs that actually enroll all of the at-risk kids."

Preschool works, according to a recent legislative study.

Students who took part in the state's pre-kindergarten initiative fared better on kindergarten assessment tests, according to report from the state's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

When children go from a pre-kindergarten class to kindergarten, "they're ready to learn," said Karen McClung, principal at Roanoke's Preston Park Primary School. "They come in knowing what they need to know."

At Preston Park one recent morning, preschool teacher Marianne Coulter helped her charges with the Pledge of Allegiance before reviewing the calendar, numbers and letters -- all skills that students will address again in kindergarten.

She asked: "If yesterday was Thursday, today is?"

About 18 children in unison: "Friday."

"And what comes after 10?" she continued, pointing to the 11 box on the calendar.

"11."

Student Tyler Baldwin then pointed to numbers on a board and led the class in counting to 11.

In French.

Then they did it in German. Then in English. Then in Spanish.

"I want to remind you we've still got the letter P we're working on," Coulter said once the multilingual counting was done.

Besides learning their letters and numbers, children also learn to cooperate, to share and to speak in full sentences, said McClung.

Roger LaDouceur, whose son is in preschool at Preston Park, said early education is giving his children "a leg up."

LaDouceur also has a son in kindergarten at Preston Park who went to preschool.

"It kind of opened him up like a flower," he said.

"They want us to read to them more," LaDouceur added. "That's a big thing for a 4-year-old to ask you to read to him after he gets home from school. That's fantastic."

Classrooms like these are at the top of Kaine's agenda.

"We know that children who attend high quality preschool are more likely to finish school, find good jobs and are less likely to commit a crime," he said in the Jan. 9 State of the Commonwealth speech to the General Assembly.

His proposal would overcome space shortages in public schools by making it easier to use state money to send children to private preschools, said Kaine's spokesman Gordon Hickey.

State Secretary of Education Tom Morris told a House Committee on Wednesday that Kaine's proposal also would allow localities to receive greater per-pupil funding from the state and would cap the amount that localities have to add to match the state support.

Still, claims that Kaine's proposed expansion would reach 17,000 children "do not appear to be realistic," according to the JLARC report.

And some lawmakers are concerned about the enrollment numbers.

"It would indicate that there is a serious problem in the localities," said House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith, R-Salem. "Not that they don't want to do things, but that they don't have the capital to build the school classrooms to house this new program."

Del. William Fralin, R-Roanoke, said the state must "make sure we're using the money we're already spending as efficiently and effectively as possible."

It's still unclear how Kaine's measure will fare in the General Assembly.

Regardless, Cundiff vowed to beef up the city's program.

"We're not at capacity now," she said. "We know this is a top priority for our school division and we'll do what we need to do."

"When we open in the fall, the preschool will look very different in the city."

Staff writer Michael Sluss contributed to this report.