Kindergarten Readiness Instrument (KRI’s) tests are given to our 4 year olds in September as the school begins and once again in April as the year winds down. This tool allows us to document students’ progress through the year and to ensure students are ready to enter Kindergarten. KRI’s parallels Memphis City School’s Kindergarten Evaluation and addresses Readiness Skills, Motor Skills, Handwriting Skills, Mathematics and Language Arts. Perea students’ scores for April, 09 are as follows:

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) is a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be short (one minute) fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills. When comparing Perea graduates against the remainder of the student body of our neighborhood elementary school, 75% of our former students scored average or above compared to 55% of those not attending Perea.

HighScope Perry Preschool Study

Lifetime Effects: The HighScope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 40 (2005)
This study — perhaps the most well-known of all HighScope research efforts — examines the lives of 123 African Americans born in poverty and at high risk of failing in school.

From 1962–1967, at ages 3 and 4, the subjects were randomly divided into a program group that received a high-quality preschool program based on HighScope's participatory learning approach and a comparison group who received no preschool program. In the study's most recent phase, 97% of the study participants still living were interviewed at age 40. Additional data were gathered from the subjects' school, social services, and arrest records.

The study found that adults at age 40 who had the preschool program had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have preschool.