The Petal School District is hosting two events at Petal Primary School designed to help parents and children with the transition to kindergarten.
The events – Kindergarten Round Up and Kindergarten Information Day – give parents and children a chance to get acquainted with the school system, as well as provide school officials the opportunity to assess children’s skill levels.
Kindergarten Roundup – which will be held April 22, 23, 24 and 25 – offers incoming kindergartners a head start to the upcoming school year, while giving families the opportunity to get them pre-registered. Students will also participate in a basic screener to evaluate their knowledge of letters, sounds, numbers, and vocabulary, and to ensure there are no speech concerns.
“Most importantly (with this event), we’re able to get eyes on all of these children, just so that we can learn a little bit about them that helps us place the kids,” primary school principal Tessa Trimm said. “We don’t know these kiddos, and so this is the opportunity for us to get to know them just a little bit.
“It helps us in placing the children into the 15 or 16 classrooms. And the other piece of this is, we need to know our numbers for staffing purposes – how many teacher units we need for the 2024-25 school year. Trend data kind of gives us an idea of what we need, but every once in a while, you have that year where you’re just going to have an influx of kids, and we just need to know that.”
During the April 22, 23 and 24 events, teachers will visit local daycare centers such as Life Construction Learning Academy and Panther’s Den Learning Center. Children that are not in a local preschool will be screened from 8 a.m.-1 p.m. April 25 at the primary school at 60 Herrington Road in Petal.
“Those parents (of children not in preschool) will actually bring them here (to the primary school),” Trimm said. “But everyone will fill out a registration form, whether they’re in a local daycare or not.
“Some of them go to Hattiesburg because their parents work out there, or they’re just at home with family members, but everybody fills that form out. As you fill that form out, it’s going to send you to the right page of the form, to either sign up for a screening (at the primary school) on the 25th, or they’re going to choose their child’s daycare and it’s going to take them (to the proper screen).”
The form can be found on the primary school’s website at https://pps.petalschools.com. Students must live in the Petal School District and be 5 years old on or before September 1 to be eligible for kindergarten.
The deadline to sign up for Kindergarten Roundup is April 24.
Current kindergarten students at Petal Primary School will not attend school on April 25, as the teachers for that grade will be handling the roundup event.
Kindergarten Information Day will be held from 9 a.m.-noon May 4 at the primary school campus. The purpose of the come-and-go event is to give incoming kindergartners and their families the chance to visit campus before the new school year begins.
The tours will be self-guided with teachers and staff available to answer questions. Signup is not necessary for the information event.
“They can just come when they want – we’ll have staff around campus for the self-guided tour,” Trimm said. “We’ll have administrators in lots of different locations, we’ll have teachers, and we’ll have kindergarten classrooms open for parents to go through with their children.
“It’s going to be important they bring their child to go through and see that. We’ll have some people here from (Petal) Excel By 5 here volunteering, and we’ll have the cafeteria open so they can pretend and walk through the line, and the playgrounds will be open.”
