Joan Benso, president and CEO of Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, has watched the numbers of children in full-day kindergarten and those with health insurance increase substantially in recent years.

	Online Graphic See a chart that shows the state's performance on school readiness indicators.

Now she and her organization have drawn a line in the sand, saying Pennsylvania can never go backwards when it comes to getting young children a good start.

"From here forward, we should only go forward," Benso said.

Pennsylvania Partnerships for Children, a Harrisburg-based nonprofit group that focuses on children's issues, this week released a list of 14 "school readiness indicators" that it plans to track.

"One of the things I think is very important for policy makers and community planners to realize is there are places we have made remarkable headway. We need to keep our nose to the grindstone and not slide back there.

"There is still room for improvement in ensuring all Pennsylvania children are ready for school."

She noted that school districts are spending about $111.3 million -- 60 percent of the available state accountability block grants -- on full-day kindergarten. That has resulted in the percentage of kindergartners in full-day kindergarten growing from 33 percent in 2002-03 to 51 percent in 2004-05.

"Clearly, that's an outcome of the passage of the education accountability block grant," Benso said.

She said numerous studies show that children who attend full-day kindergarten are more likely to do well in the early grades of elementary school, need less remediation and need less special education.

School districts also could spend the block grant money on other changes, such as reducing class size or pre-kindergarten education, but fewer have chosen to do so.

The list showed that 16.8 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through third grade in school districts and charter schools were in classes with 17 or fewer students.

It also showed that just 10,271 children statewide were in public pre-kindergarten programs last fall and named just two districts -- Pittsburgh and Highlands -- in Allegheny County offering such programs.

The figures show a low percentage of children in what the partnership called high-quality day care, just 3.9 percent statewide. That includes those in settings that have won approvals from groups such as the National Association for the Education of Young Children or Keystone Stars.

But Benso said that number will be growing because 58 percent of the child care centers in the state are participating in Keystone STARS, which promotes standards and offers help to meet them.

She said the provision of health insurance to children is the state's "greatest child success story."

Since a state law was passed in the early 1990s, she said, the number of uninsured children has dropped dramatically.