DECATUR - Making sure children are really ready for kindergarten benefits everybody - the child, the school, the parents and the community.

That is why Our Lady of Lourdes Principal Maryrose Hagenbach arranged a meeting for parochial schools with the Decatur Area Education Coalition.

Lourdes school board President Bill Lehmann made the initial call, asking the coalition's executive director, Barb Beck, if any of the private schools were part of the coalition.

"She said, 'No, but there wasn't any reason we couldn't be,' " Hagenbach said. From there, Hagenbach called the principals of St. Patrick, Holy Family, St. Teresa High School and Lutheran School Association.

The high school's real involvement will come later, when the coalition starts working on its goal of creating more career education for teens. The goal the elementary schools are interested in at the moment is kindergarten readiness.

"We're investigating changing our screening instrument to the one they're using in District 61 that the coalition has taken to all the preschools," Hagenbach said. "It's a standardized test, nationally normed and more broad and useful than the test we had been using."

In an effort to reach all children entering kindergarten and make the process more convenient for busy parents, screening is available at day cares and preschools throughout the city.

If the parochial schools use the same test the public schools use, called the Brigance, all the schools will be speaking a common language and will be better equipped to help those children who are behind their peers.

"It's not a tool that's familiar to me," said Lisa Dippel, principal of LSA's elementary school, who also attended the meeting. "But I thought it would be wise to take a look at it."

Dippel plans to recruit her staff to help her study Brigance and decide if LSA should use it, too. St. Paul's Lutheran Day Care and Preschool is one of the sites where the district's kindergarten screenings take place and is a major feeder school for LSA, she said.

The coalition's Kindergarten Readiness Calendar, available at all the schools and preschools, contains monthly and daily ideas for helping excite a child's curiosity and natural interest in learning and in giving the child the tools to be ready for the structure of school.

"That's our goal," Beck said. "We want all children to enter kindergarten ready to learn, ready for success, and I think you set the right tone for school so they'll feel comfortable and happy."

Valerie Wells can be reached at vwells@ herald-review.com or 421-7982.