2011 The Palm Beach County Family Study (Full Report)

focal children had scores on both the ECHOS and FAIR screens. When we measured the correlationsbetween scores on the ECHOS and the FAIR assessments for children who were screened on bothassessments, we found that they were significantly correlated (Spearman R 2 =.443, p < .001).As displayed in Figure 6, of the focal children who were screened on the ECHOS, three-fourths (76%)were considered “ready” for kindergarten as determined by a rating of either consistently demonstratingor emerging/progressing. 71 These results are below those reported for all public school kindergartners inPalm Beach County (87%), as well as slightly below those for the subgroup of children who participate inthe free or reduced school lunch program (81%) in 2009 (CSC 2010).Figure 6 also present separate results by the focal children’s sex and race/ethnicity. The differencesbetween girls and boys were very small. However, the results vary based on race and ethnicity. Notably,children identified as black and white/other were much more likely than children identified as Hispanic toscore ready for kindergarten on the ECHOS (81% and 84% vs. 69%). The direction of these differences isconsistent with that of the racial and ethnic disparities for the county as a whole (CSC 2010).Results for the FAIR portion of the FLKRS are presented in Figure 7. Almost 38 percent of the samplechildren were assessed with a probability of reading success score at or above 67 percent, which isconsidered ready for kindergarten. This is considerably lower than the 65 percent of children screened bythe school district in 2009; it is also lower than the 50 percent of children participating in the free orreduced lunch program who were screened (CSC 2010). The pattern of racial and ethnic differences wassimilar to that observed in the ECHOS results.Next, we conducted analyses to determine if service use and characteristics of mothers and children aresignificantly associated with the likelihood of children being ready for school on the ECHOS and on theFAIR. First we looked at the maternal and child characteristics that might be associated with childrenbeing screened as ready for school on the ECHOS. The descriptive data in Table 65 suggest that scoring“ready for school” on the ECHOS is associated with the following baseline characteristics: languagespoken at home, the overall parenting score, and whether or not the mother was living with her husbandor partner. In addition, there appears to be an association with childcare arrangement in year 5, the yearprior to the child’s entry into kindergarten, in that children who did not score “ready for school” weremore likely to have been cared for at home or with a relative or friend than children who did.71 Unlike other descriptive data in this report, these are unweighted results because we used children who remained in the sampleat year 4 and year 5 and it would have been difficult to calculate one weight to apply to all children. When we looked just atchildren in the year 5 sample, the differences between the weighted and unweighted data were very small.Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago 122