California mandates one adult for every 12 students in what it calls “transitional kindergarten." It’s the second year of an uneven four-year rollout of universal transitional kindergarten, an ambitious, multi-billion dollar initiative to make high-quality education available to each of the state’s 4-year-olds, an estimated 400,000 children. The plan is that the $2.7 billion program will be fully implemented by the 2025-26 school year across the nearly 900 districts in the state that include elementary grades. It will be the largest universal prekindergarten program in the country. But like the children in these two classrooms—some of whom are ready for school and others who aren’t even potty-trained—some districts are on schedule and some are not. Some, but not all, of these kinks might be worked out by the time the program is fully implemented in 2025. The state is slowly increasing the number of children who are eligible based on birth month, an approach that has been confusing for parents but which buys districts time to set up appropriate spaces to meet demand. By offering free, high-quality transitional kindergarten in public schools, California will go a long way to help level the playing field for children entering kindergarten, officials say. Regardless of income, families will have access to top-notch early schooling. Additionally, officials say the state’s massive investment will shine a light on the earliest years of education and make it more likely that districts will align curriculum from preschool through third grade. That’s the hope. In the meantime, districts are figuring out how to serve this new, and quite different, age group without a unifying roadmap. “There’s a new grade out there and no clear guidance yet from the state as to what should be covered in it,” said Alix Gallagher, Director of Strategic Partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE), based at Stanford University. On the one hand, Gallagher said, the state could be criticized for not having clear guidance about what transitional kindergarten should look like when it started the expansion, especially since some districts had been offering transitional kindergarten for a decade before the statewide mandate. “On the other hand,” Gallagher said, “making a new grade and requiring universal access is not something that is always politically available.”