Amanda Klein-Cox is a mom to a rising kindergartener, a former public school educator, and a current researcher and evaluator.
For five months this year, my family has been on a journey to enroll my daughter in kindergarten.
We had planned to enroll her in our neighborhood school in fall 2026. Our district’s cutoff had been September 30, and she turns 5 in September.
So, when her preschool administrator asked me in January what our plans were now that the cutoff date was the first day of school, I was blindsided.
She informed me of a new Ohio law that was quietly passed in the fall – House Bill 114.
Under the new law, districts across the state have more uniform eligibility cutoffs for kindergarten – the first day of school. This is reasonable.
However,
as a former public school educator with graduate degrees in public policy, I feel strongly that the way this policy has been implemented is detrimental to many Ohio children and families.
For a law that impacts the life plans of many children and families across the state, there was very little media coverage.
Many families are likely still trying to enroll their late-summer/early-fall babies into kindergarten and will be shocked to learn that they are no longer eligible. If my child’s school had not told us about this change, we would have been one of these families. There is also no waiver or grace period built into the law’s implementation, leaving districts and families in the lurch this school year.
The only way our daughter could start public kindergarten this year was through the early-entrance testing process. This is where the policy flaws become even more egregious. In Ohio, starting kindergarten early (even if it is by a matter of weeks) is treated the same way as skipping a grade.
Punishing kids due to their birthdates
Instead of giving my child the state’s chosen Kindergarten Readiness Assessment, she had to take an intelligence test and achievement tests, neither of which tell us if she is ready to begin kindergarten.
I am now a researcher and evaluator, and in this work, it is critical that whatever surveys or assessments we choose are measuring the concept we are actually studying. Ohio’s early entrance policy is a classic example of measuring the wrong thing. Instead of determining if my child had the social-emotional, literacy and numeracy skills needed to do well in a kindergarten classroom, she was tested for giftedness. And because she was not in the 90th percentile or higher on every indicator of the achievement tests (she missed only the reading subsections because, of course, she is not fully literate at age 4), she was told by the district to wait a year to enroll.
Ohio is holding young students to much higher standards than their peers who are just a few weeks older. If my daughter had been born in early August, she would not have been subject to any of this or expected to achieve at these levels.
Younger children who would actually do well in kindergarten are being punished for the day they were born.
Kids falling between a rock and a hard place
Families like ours are left with impossible choices. We know wholeheartedly that our daughter is ready for kindergarten and were prepared to advocate for her. Yet we were being told to keep her in preschool for another year – which we feel would be detrimental to her.
Our only other choice was to find a private kindergarten that was both accredited by the state and employed state-certified teachers so that if we try to enroll her in public school for first grade, she will not have to be tested again. Either way, we have to pay for another year of schooling, and for so many families, this is either not possible or life-changing.
From my experience in public education, schools and districts were always eager to increase enrollment and welcome new families.
Yet in Ohio, we are sticking families of future high achievers between a rock and a hard place and often sending them out of the district. The state actually incentivizes this by offering the EdChoice scholarship to families whose children are enrolling in private school but are not coming from failing districts.
HB 114 could have been implemented so differently, with proper communication to Ohioans, grace periods for the 2026-27 school year and appropriate testing processes to see whether younger children are, in fact, ready for kindergarten. Instead, the state has put families on a roller coaster and chosen to change the trajectories of their children.
Amanda Klein-Cox, Ed.D., is a mom to a rising kindergartener, a former public school educator, and a current researcher and evaluator. As the owner of Engage with Data, she supports child- and family-serving organizations with evaluation and capacity-building services.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: New Ohio kindergarten law pushing my daughter between a rock and hard place | Opinion
