Selling+Lemonade+to+Fund+All-Day+Kindergarten

=//Published by the Times Leader//= =//6/24/11//=

=GOOGLE A RECIPE for lemonade and find a textbook example of simplicity: Water, lemon juice, sugar ... easy enough for a kindergarten student to make with minimum adult supervision.= =So the idea of setting up a lemonade stand to protest the elimination of full-day kindergarten – as Crestwood School District parents did Wednesday – is as fundamentally cohesive as glue mixed from water and flour.= =The stand, complete with grinning children holding up hand-lettered signs (“keep Crestwood great!”) drew attention to school board plans to cut full-day kindergarten in an effort to fill a financial shortfall created by Gov. Tom Corbett’s plan to hack state education funding with a chainsaw.= =Other efforts to mitigate the damage from the cuts have been tried: Revisions of Corbett’s proposal by the state Legislature, a push for Harrisburg to use part of an unexpected $540 million surplus this year to reduce the cuts, talks between teacher union and school board to freeze teacher pay.= =But all this is the equivalent of adults complicating the recipe for lemonade. The answer is simple: State mandated and funded full-day kindergarten.= =Research relentlessly shows such a move pays huge dividends in child development and learning.= =Our collective failure to guarantee full-day kindergarten suggests too many of us were deprived of that opportunity.=

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