Jeanette Wolfberg is reporting for The Columbia Paper enrollment rates for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten class in Columbia County’s six public school districts vary sharply. According to data from the state Education Department, in Columbia County 18.3 percent of the Chatham school district's kindergarteners that enrolled in 2017, attended public pre-k the previous year. In Germantown, the enrollment rate during the same period was nearly 89 percent. The remaining four districts fall somewhere in between. In related news, beginning in September 2019, the Hudson City School District will offer 2-year kindergarten, but the majority of its students will still enroll in the one-year program. The two-year program is intended for children judged at the time of kindergarten screening to be “not ready for kindergarten,” Hudson City School District Superintendent Maria L. Suttmeier said. Every year kindergarten screening identifies 15 to 20 children who need more than one year to prepare for first grade, she said. The two-year classes will be separate from the one-year and pre-kindergarten classes. In state statistics students in both years of the two-year program will be counted as kindergarteners, said Mark Brenneman, principal of Montgomery C. Smith Elementary School. Read the full story in The Columbia Paper.