Comment on FR Doc # 2013-11821

The Petal Excel By 5 coalition is dedicated to insuring that children in Petal, Mississippi enter school healthy, happy and ready to succeed. As such, we would like to recommend that Priority 3 and the definition of Kindergarten Entry Assessment (KEA) embrace and encourage the monitoring of school readiness at the population level. Using such an assessment can both inform a community's efforts to close the school readiness gap at kindergarten entry and to build a continuum of early care and education at the family, pre-school and primary school levels. A population based measure allows for seeing how vulnerabilities in readiness domains are distributed across the community for ALL children. As a result, the community can take collective ownership of the results and engage stakeholders around implementing proven strategies to impact identified vulnerabilities. We recommend that the KEA used to monitor school readiness at the population level, should be: 1)based on assessments completed by kindergarten teachers who have known students a minimum of three months; 2)inclusive of all essential domains of school readiness; 3)relatively easy to train teachers and for them to administer, 4)inclusive of student address data so that the data can be reported at the census tract level; and 5)valid and reliable including evidence of predictive validity. Use of the Early Development Instrument, EDI, in the Petal community has been instrumental in guiding planning efforts and in engaging the community as a whole around efforts to improve outcomes for all children.