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On September 6th, the all new St. Vincent Ascension YMCA opened it's doors in downtown Evansville.  As part of this new facility, we've partnered with the YMCA through the Upgrade initiative to install the Upgrade Teaching Kitchen.  This kitchen will be used for group instruction aimed at making healthy food choices and preparing healthy meals.

See the Evansville Courier & Press coverage for more details and photos from the grand opening.

On Wednesday, September 4th, the Kindergarten Readiness Indicators (KRI) was unanimously approved by the Indiana State Board of Education.

WBF and our development partner, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation have been working towards this since 2017.

Adoption of the KRI by the state means that every Pre-K student participating in the state’s On My Way Pre-K (OMWPK) subsidy program will be assessed using the KRI.

KRI Background

In 2017, the Welborn Baptist Foundation and Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation contracted with NORC at the University of Chicago to develop a Kindergarten Readiness Indicators (KRI) tool for use, royalty free, among Pre-K providers in Indiana. The KRI is designed to take 15-20 minutes per student to administer and is a direct measure of literacy, oral language and math skills.

To develop the KRI, NORC has adapted a more comprehensive, observational assessment system currently being used in Northwest Indiana known as Getting on Track Early for School Success. Getting on Track was iteratively developed and tested with both students and teachers, independently peer-reviewed by experts in the field of early education and subjected to rigorous statistical validation. In adapting this system for wider use in Indiana as a KRI, NORC has selected a subset of test items from Getting on Track in order to keep the KRI short while still maximizing coverage of topics within Indiana’s Early Learning Development Framework Foundations and preserving the validity of the assessment as a reliable indicator of students’ kindergarten readiness.

The KRI is administered one-on-one by a trained assessor, such as a Pre-K teacher. The data collection is entirely electronic and mobile-optimized, while employing some physical stimuli, such as pictures and countable objects, for children. In spring 2018, NORC administered the KRI to 415 Pre-K students across both Marion and Vanderburgh counties. This includes students of diverse racial and socio-economic backgrounds and students in Pre-K providers with varying levels of quality, as well as some students who were not in a formal Pre-K program. Learnings from the spring 2018 administration identified some minor adjustments to the questions asked, and shortened administration time. NORC followed up with these students in September once they entered kindergarten – using the adjusted KRI - to ensure that the assessment administered in the spring of the Pre-K year delivered a reliable assessment of kindergarten readiness in the fall of the kindergarten year. An extension of the KRI testing in spring 2019 provided validation data for this final version of the KRI, as well as identified unique challenges in administration across provider types.