By Mary Stewart | The Selma Times-Journal

Three Selma City elementary schools will get their Kindergarten programs back this year.

Edgewood, Knox and Sophia P. Kingston will welcome kindergarteners back into their buildings in the fall. Johnny Moss III, president of the Selma City Schools’ Board of Education, is excited to see how the schools benefit from this change.

“Financially, we will be able to retain units. We lost some units due to losing some students so that will enable us to transfer those units back to those elementary schools,” he explained “Cost wise, it will help us as a system.”

He also said the move will help parents who have more than one child at the same school with transportation.

The kindergarten programs moved to Byrd last year as a decision made by the previous board.

Moss and the rest of the school board decided that the cons outweighed the pros in this case.

“We started looking at the cost for transportation. We looked at safety with transporting students from one school to another school,” Moss said. “We looked at the loss in instruction time. We just thought that it was costly, and it would be more convenient for us to move those students back.”

Students were picked up at their respective elementary schools, taken to Byrd and then dropped off at their elementary schools at the end of the day to be picked up.

Moss also believed that only moving some of the kindergarten programs was unfair.

“I felt that we needed to move those students back so that every kindergarten student was getting the same curriculum that they would be getting at (Byrd),” Moss said.

The teachers who moved to Byrd from the respective elementary schools will move back to their original school with the students.

Moss wanted to remind citizens that the pre-K program will continue at Byrd as if nothing has changed.

He said that the Kindergarten program will only see a minor change.

“They will still be doing the same things that they were doing at Byrd, but they will just be doing them in a different building,” Moss said. “It’s not a change in curriculum or instruction. It’s just a change in the building.”

Moss said each elementary school, as well as the students who attend the schools, will benefit greatly from bringing the programs back.