ZELIENOPLE — Connoquenessing Valley Elementary School is getting a full-day preschool program this school year to help children successfully transition into school when the time comes.

The school will play host to a Pre-K Counts classroom for children age 3 to 5.

The full-day, five-day a week early childhood education program is administered by the Butler County Children's Center, a private, nonprofit corporation and academic school that provides children's programs.

The children's center also runs the district's Head Start program at Rowan Elementary School.

This is Connoquenessing Valley's first preschool program.

DeeAnn Graham, principal at CVE, said she connected with the children's center a few years ago through the Butler County Early Care and Educational Council and began talking about hosting a Pre-K Counts classroom at her school, but the funding was not there at the time.

Finally this summer the children's center got a grant to establish the program at CVE, Graham said.

The program will benefit the district's youngest students in a number of ways, Graham said, from teaching them early literacy skills and working with numbers to learning how to listen, play and share.

The class size is capped at 20, and the teacher-to-student ratio is kept high to meet each student's needs.

“That's so huge especially for little learners,” she said.

To get into the Pre-K Counts program, children must be in families earning up to 300 percent of the poverty level and may have other risk factors that necessitate early intervention like special needs or learning English as a second language.

They do not have to be from the district.

While the Pre-K Counts program is run by the Butler County Children's Center, Graham said they plan to make the children a part of the CVE school community as much as possible.

The preschool students will be a part of special programs, dress-up days and other schoolwide activities.

Seneca Valley is one of five locations to host the Pre-K Counts program. There are also classes at Dassa McKinney Elementary, Northwest Elementary, Sugar Creek Elementary and Shenango Township Elementary.