Teacher Autumn Johnson reads a scary story to her kindergarten class at Shoreline Elementary during the school’s fall festival last October.

Starting in September 2012, public schools in Michigan must offer full-day kindergarten to receive full funding for each student. The districts can still offer half-day, but will only receive half the funding for those students who attend.

Under the current program, school districts receive the full amount of funding for each kindergartner, which is around $7,000, even if they only attend school for half a day. With the new formula, schools will only receive half of that for each student who attends half-day kindergarten.

According to Michigan’s Senate, 42 states require all school districts to offer kindergarten, and out of those 42, nine require all school districts to offer full-day kindergarten.

Lawmakers revised the School Aid Act to require kindergarten students to receive the same amount of instructional hours as students in grades 1-12.

Montague Area Public Schools Superintendent Nate Robrahn said the district plans to switch to full-day kindergarten.

“We built the MACC (Montague Area Childhood Center) knowing that this was going to happen,” Robrahn said. The MACC opened its doors for the first time last September.

The kindergarten students will attend school all day, every day of the week.

The district will have to hire 2-3 more teachers in order to make the switch, said Robrahn.

“That is going to create some issues with our budget,” Robrahn said. The district will plan accordingly when those changes take place. More information will be available at Montague’s school board meeting on Monday, Feb. 27, at 6 p.m.

Whitehall District Schools Superintendent Jerry McDowell said their plan is to also change to full-day kindergarten.

“We are hoping to embed our half-day kindergarten program into full-day,” McDowell said. “But we will have a better sense of parents’ ideas and thoughts after the kindergarten round-up.”

According to McDowell, if the district continued with half-day kindergarten, they would lose around $500,000. After the switch to full-day, the school will have spent around $250,000 on teachers and other necessities.

“This change will definitely affect the budget,” McDowell said.

While Whitehall schools hasn’t built a new building like Montague’s MACC, McDowell said that he isn’t worried about needing more space.

“We have a building that is set up for something like this,” McDowell said.

Parents and their students are invited to attend the round-up to sign up their students for kindergarten and meet the teachers and principal on Thursday, Feb. 23.