Garden Valley School Division is rolling out a pilot project this fall to try out the idea of a Kindergarten program that is all day, every other day.
Plum Coulee School will be testing the waters on this idea for the 2026-2027 and 2027-2028 school years, stepping away from its traditional half-a-day, every day Kindergarten programming.
It will give the division the data it needs to decide whether the every-other-day schedule should continue and possibly even be expanded to other Winkler area schools, said superintendent Dan Ward.
“We’ve been hearing for the last few years that a number of our parents are finding it challenging to pick Kindergarten children up at lunch or to drop them off at lunch, depending on the program,” he said. GVSD elementary schools have Kindergartners attend class either all morning or all afternoon. “Many of our students have both parents working, and they don’t always have someone like a grandparent or other relative able to pick the children up if they’re not able to.”
In some cases, families were opting not to enrol their children in Kindergarten as a result (Kindergarten is not compulsory in Manitoba). Or, if enrolled, some students were missing classes certain days of the week when families couldn’t arrange for half-day childcare or transportation.
This new schedule should make it much easier for families, as out-of-town Kindergartners will be able to take the bus to and from school, while in-town students can walk or get dropped off at the same time as their siblings at a time potentially more in line with their parents’ workdays.
Full-day Kindergarten is commonplace in many other school divisions, so Ward said they’re not anticipating any major problems with rolling this out. Nonetheless, they thought it best to start with a smaller school.
“Plum Coulee was a natural fit,” he said, noting the school has many families where the parents do not work in town, complicating student pick-up and drop-off.
“We will work with the families when the children need a little bit more time to adjust [to full-day learning],” Ward noted. “That’s part of the plan, and that’s why we want to start in one school and learn from that ourselves firsthand, rather than just starting this in all our Kindergarten programs across the school division.”
Plum Coulee School principal Mary Eberling-Penner shared that staff are excited to be leading this pilot project, and eager to see the impact it has on students and families.
Kindergarten gives children a great headstart on their primary educations, she noted, equipping them early with foundational literacy, numerary, and social skills.
“It’s really important,” she said. ”When we talk about what a Kindergartner will learn, by the time they finish their year in June they are reading books with two or three or four lines of text on every page. So they’re not just learning letters—it’s actually the first stages of reading.
“If they don’t do that in Kindergarten it has to be caught up in Grade 1, and that makes it more challenging for the child to feel like they’re at the same place as other kids.”
A full day of instruction will also allow for a bit more breathing room in the Kindergartners’ school day, Eberling-Penner noted.
“It can be a very fast-paced half day,” she noted. “That’s one of the advantages to this is we have them for a more sustained block of time.”
Feedback from Plum Coulee parents has thus far been overwhelmingly positive, Eberling-Penner shared, but they’ll be consulting with families throughout to ensure the change is working the way they hope it will.
“They’ve given us a two-year pilot, which is excellent,” she said. “It means that when we have to make the decision in two years we will have a full year from start to finish and then we’ll be partway through the second year when the division is asking us for our feedback.
“So we’ll have enough time to actually look at how it went the full year and see what the families felt and see what the difference in the children’s academics was.”
