Four years ago this month, one of the most devastating wildfires in Oregon’s history erupted across the southern portion of the state.

As the COVID pandemic raged, leaving children out of schools and away from regular routines and social interactions, the fire only magnified the disruption. It destroyed thousands of homes in the agricultural towns that make up the Phoenix-Talent School District, displacing hundreds of families and closing as many businesses.

The wildfire, as with any natural disaster, had many ripple effects throughout the region. One that the district is still grappling with is the impact on young children. For the last few years, children have been entering kindergarten without some of the basic skills and abilities that had once been commonplace.

“It’s hard to separate the fire and pandemic,” says Tiffanie Lambert, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning at Phoenix-Talent School District. “The fire really exaggerated the learning losses and learning gaps of the pandemic. It made them even more visible, and it made them last longer.”

During the pandemic, many early learning programs and preschools — already a scarce resource in the area, Lambert says — shuttered temporarily. Then the fire, which damaged some early learning facilities, forced further closures. The two events prevented many children from accessing high-quality, in-person early care and education opportunities before kindergarten.

Plus, Lambert says, some of their families lost work, hurting them economically. Many of their parents were experiencing mental health challenges. Their households were filled with stress.

The combination of all of these factors helps explain the state of the district’s recent cohorts of incoming kindergarteners, she says. Many have lacked the social skills to interact with their peers, the ability to follow instructions and stick to a routine, the attention spans to sit through an entire story read aloud in class, Lambert says. Few had early learning experiences prior to starting school, she adds, and even concepts like which direction to turn the pages in a book are foreign to many of them.

Phoenix-Talent may be a more dramatic example, given the added impacts of the wildfire in 2020, but it is far from an anomaly. Across the country, elementary school teachers and leaders report that children are entering kindergarten worse off than their peers of the past. They have underdeveloped social-emotional and fine motor skills. Some are not yet able to use the restroom independently.

“The news is sobering,” says Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, an assessment company that recently published research showing that the nation’s youngest learners, especially, are still struggling to rebound from the pandemic’s disruption to learning and development. “The impact of the pandemic is lasting way longer than we anticipated.”

The differences are hard to miss. More children are having trouble separating from their parents or caregivers when they go to school, for example, because maybe they haven’t had much or any time apart from them until now.

“We see a lot of concern from parents and from teachers,” says Rachel Robertson, chief academic officer at Bright Horizons, which operates more than 600 early care and education centers in the U.S.

Many educators and researchers, in interviews, point out that these developmental differences may not all be a result of the pandemic and the lower rates of preschool enrollment that followed it. Children’s reliance on screens, including very young children — even infants and toddlers — is likely a factor.

Robertson believes screens are responsible for much of the disruption to fine motor development. Rather than reading physical books, some children are having stories read aloud to them from a phone. Rather than doing arts and craft activities, which give them a chance to practice holding a crayon or using scissors, they’re swiping on tablets.

“We’re having consequences of screens that we didn’t predict,” Robertson notes.

The good news is that even if children are “behind,” that can easily — and sometimes quickly — change. They pick up skills fast at such a young age, especially when learning is steeped in curiosity and wonder, Robertson says.

Children need certain skills and competencies to be ready to show up, participate and thrive in kindergarten, educators and child development experts say. But many kids — and an increasing number over the last four years — lack access to the resources and experiences that introduce those skills to them before they start elementary school. Noting this worrying downward trend, many school districts have stepped in with their own solutions to support early learners as they prepare to start school. We take a close look at two of them.

Oregon’s Jump Start Kindergarten

During the pandemic, leaders at the Oregon Department of Education understood that early learning programs were critical for preparing children to transition to kindergarten and that those programs were much less accessible and available to families at the time, creating a “critical need,” says Marc Siegel, communications director for the state’s department of education, in a written response to EdSurge.

Leaders “understood that additional support was necessary to ensure our youngest learners were prepared for the social, emotional and academic demands of public school environments after a prolonged period without in-person learning opportunities,” he adds.

Those sentiments led to the creation of Jump Start Kindergarten, a state-funded program that utilizes Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funds from the federal pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act to provide incoming kindergartners and their families with an “on-ramp” to kindergarten.

The Jump Start program varies based on the needs of each school and community where it’s implemented, Siegel says, but all include a few key components. Every Jump Start program has a half-day classroom experience for at least two weeks, for a minimum of 30 hours total, characterized by hands-on activities, establishing classroom routines, and building relationships with other children and educators. Additionally, each program offers partnerships with community-based organizations and provides experiences to promote family engagement, such as playground meet-and-greets, a school-based scavenger hunt or an opportunity to meet school staff.

Phoenix-Talent School District has offered the Jump Start Kindergarten program during the last three summers, with noticeable results, Lambert says. It has also expanded the program in a few ways.

The first year — summer 2022 — the district’s program prioritized children with special needs who had limited access to early special education services. During those few weeks, they learned to follow a routine, to line up as a class, to use a paper towel dispenser, Lambert recalls.

In the second and third year, the district expanded the program by opening it up to any child who didn’t attend preschool or another early learning program and increased the duration to five or six weeks. This summer, the program enrolled 34 kids. (Phoenix-Talent was estimating 140 kindergarteners this fall, and Lambert says 50 or 60 slots would’ve been ideal.)

The children who attended Jump Start Kindergarten seem to be “much more prepared” and more committed to showing up to school each day, Lambert shares. “We saw a big difference in attendance. That impacts academics, too. Students don’t learn if they’re not at school.”

Overall, kindergarteners in the district had an attendance rate of 59 percent in the 2023-24 school year, whereas the students that had attended Jump Start the prior summer came 78 percent of the time. (It’s too early to collect data for the 2024-25 school year.)

The Jump Start program has been a boon at Phoenix-Talent, especially now that staff have figured out how best to run it. Its future, however, hangs in the balance, with ESSER funding expiring at the end of this month and replacement funding from the state uncertain.

“We’re pretty sad about it,” Lambert says. “It helps kids — and their parents — be more comfortable starting school. … I think we’re going to need that for many, many years.”

Baby Bags, Badging and Beyond

Without a designated program from the state, other districts have had to be a bit more scrappy.

Leaders in Manheim Central School District, in Manheim, Pennsylvania, realized that the pandemic would impact even the children not yet in school, and that they would need extra support.

“We knew we had to do things differently,” says Tracy Fasick, the recently retired director of curriculum and instruction for the small, rural district.

They came up with a multi-pronged strategy that would engage families early — as early as possible, in fact — and would create better communication and consistency with local early learning programs.

One of those strategies was “baby bags.” When a baby was born in the district — somewhere on the order of 210 to 240 times per year, Fasick says — she would drop off a bag that included resources on local programs and early intervention services, some toys and learning materials, and a sippy cup and bib with the district’s mascot.

“Right away, it establishes that this is a future child who will come to our school,” Fasick says of the bags. “It’s welcoming.”

In the district’s kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms, teachers use “badging,” where kids don’t get letter grades but badges for different skills and competencies they’ve mastered. For example, in those early elementary grades, a child can earn a badge if they achieve certain literacy and numeracy goals.

Fasick wanted to get the district’s future students more accustomed to that system, so she met with all of the preschool leaders in the area and helped them develop age- and developmentally-appropriate badges for the preschoolers, working backwards from the badges available for kindergarteners. Now, those programs offer badging, too. Kids can earn them for gross motor skills — if they can hop and skip — and for zipping or buttoning their own coats, for sitting still and following directions.

The preschool programs now, Fasick says, “are very aware of what we’re teaching in kindergarten, so they can prepare [the children] for what is going to be happening in kindergarten.”

She adds: “Kids like the badging. It’s something tangible. … Learning is celebrated, which helps a lot.”

As a final push in the lead-up to kindergarten, Manheim Central provides families with “Countdown to Kindergarten” boxes at their kindergarten registration.

Aimee Ketchum, a pediatric occupational therapist and professor of early childhood development at the nearby Cedar Crest College, created the boxes to give families a crash course in everything their child would be expected to know by the time they start kindergarten.

Ideally, the kids have six months to work through all the activities in their box, which includes a planner (detailing two activities to do each month), a pencil box with fine motor manipulatives, seed packets for planting, a ruler to measure the growth of those seeds and eventual flowers, activities and scissors for developing cutting skills, note cards to practice writing their names and an index card and string with which to practice tying a shoe.

Ketchum, who assembles the boxes in her garage with her family, clarifies that they are not intended to replace more formal early learning experiences, but rather to supplement it for those who don’t have access.

“Children need access to high-quality early childhood education, and too many of them aren’t getting it,” she says. “This is an attempt to provide some tools [and] some hands-on activities, and give parents an awareness of what is expected and an opportunity to practice” those skills with their children.

Pretty much every parent and caregiver wants the best for their child, Fasick notes, but many don’t know where to begin. The boxes offer guidance.

“Families are grateful for anything they can get that will help their kid,” Fasick says. “This is an easy way to help them.”