Lower Merion parents have been asking for full-day kindergarten for years. It could happen as soon as fall 2024.

The Lower Merion school board voted Monday to plan to offer full-day kindergarten starting in fall 2024, after facing pressure from parents frustrated by the lack of the program in one of Pennsylvania’s most affluent districts.

The vote doesn’t mean full-day kindergarten is a definite: The board didn’t approve any spending for the program, which will require additional classrooms and staff.

Still, “their vote indicates that is the direction they are setting,” said Lower Merion spokesperson Amy Buckman.

The move follows a campaign by parents to add full-day kindergarten for all students in the Montgomery County district, one of a minority in Pennsylvania — along with some other suburban Philadelphia districts — to not offer the option.

“This is an enormous win,” said Abigail Lerner Rubin, one of the Lower Merion parents who has been leading the effort. While she acknowledged that details still need to be worked out, “there’s never been a start date, or start year, attached to this concept.”

Lower Merion currently offers full-day kindergarten to a small number of students identified as needing added support. In a presentation during Monday’s school board meeting, district administrators said that moving to a universal program would likely require 13 to 17 additional classrooms and 17 to 22.5 additional full-time teachers, along with an unknown number of special education and support staff.

Those costs — estimated at $1.7 million for the teachers, not including other staff or facilities costs — could prolong the rollout: Implementing a full-day program in just one year “could necessitate cuts to other programming,” Buckman said. “Allowing the planning and implementation to occur over two budget cycles will help minimize that potential immediate budget impact.”

Rubin said parents want the district to move forward with what it can. Given that some of its elementary schools have space for kindergarten classrooms, Lower Merion could increase enrollment in its current, limited full-day program by screening more students for need, Rubin said. (Buckman said the prospect of expanding the K-Plus program, which is part of the district’s equity initiatives and aims to reduce achievement gaps, was discussed, but “no decision has been made on that.”)

While there are questions about the logistics, “it’s really not a contentious issue,” Rubin said. A survey the district conducted of more than 4,000 parents — mostly of current K-12 students — found that 79% strongly agreed with adding full-day kindergarten and an additional 9% agreed, compared with 6% who strongly disagreed and 2% who disagreed. (The remaining responses were neutral.)

Parents won’t be letting up in their advocacy, which has included lawn signs and “so many emails,” Rubin said. “We want to work together.” She noted that parents have been calling for full-day kindergarten “for decades.”

In another issue that has been the focus of prolonged debate, the Lower Merion board voted Monday to move forward with proposed changes to school start times — targeted for implementation in September — aimed at enabling teenagers to get more sleep. The district will be soliciting community feedback on the proposal, which would start middle school at 8 a.m., high school at 8:40, and elementary school at 9:20.