Each year, kindergarten students across Utah take the Kindergarten Entry and Exit Profile, known as the KEEP, as one way to assess school readiness. Looking at data from this school year (Fall 2021), it is clear that Park City School District’s low-income, minority, and English-language learning students continue to score disproportionately lower than their peers on this assessment.
For example, only 32% of our English-Language learning students are proficient in literacy when entering kindergarten while 85% of their native-speaking English peers are proficient. Despite these continuing opportunity gaps, however, the promising news is that the discrepancy this year is less than it was in the prior year (2020) testing.
In fact, school readiness scores increased across the board from 2020 to 2021 for PCSD’s minority, low-income, and ELL students.
We as a community need to continue to improve school readiness for all of our future students so that everyone is healthy and ready to learn when they enter kindergarten.