Solicitation re: Kindergarten Registration Focus Groups

Posted by School District of Philadelphia on June 26, 2017

SDP Solicitation re: Kindergarten Registration Focus Groups

Thousands of families of eligible kindergartners do not register during the months (February-May) dedicated to Kindergarten registration at the School District of Philadelphia (SDP). Instead, the families do not register until early Fall. Enrollment data over the last few years has shown that less than 50 percent of incoming kindergartners are registered before the first day of school.

There are several challenges associated with families not registering their students on time, including:

1) the SDP is not able to staff and open new classrooms after the school year has started;

2) some late registration kindergartners have to be enrolled outside of their neighborhood school due to seats not being available and transportation is not provided; and

3) there is little to no transition support provided to late registration kindergartners (e.g. participation in Kindergarten Open Houses, etc.)

The ultimate goal of the Office of Early Learning and SDP is to increase on-time enrollment into Kindergarten in order to address these challenges. The first step to achieving this is to know why families do register or do not register on-time for Kindergarten so that appropriate actions can be implemented.

The SDP is requesting proposals from organizations to conduct focus groups with a minimum of 100 families who registered or did not register their child during the SDP’s on-time registration period and provide a report of findings. All responses must be submitted electronically to Ami Patel Hopkins at aphopkins-ext@philasd.org by 5pm on July 24, 2017. The solicitation can be found at: http://webgui.phila.k12.pa.us/offices/e/earlychild/http/webgui/offices/e/earlychild/k-regisfocusgroupsolicitation.