POULSBO — Washington state is offering fully funded, all-day kindergarten to school districts throughout the state, but it comes with some requirements.

North Kitsap School District accepted the full funding, which means that starting in the 2015-16 school year, the district will be using a program called Washington Kindergarten Inventory of Developing Skills, or WaKIDS.

“There are three basic pieces of WaKIDS,” said Brenda Ward, the district’s director of elementary education and technology. “The goal, really, is to get students off to a strong start right out of the game. The components of this are intended to help that happen.”

Those three components are family connection, whole-child assessment and early learning collaboration.

Family connection “is taking some time before school starts or as close to the start of school as possible to meet with families one on one and give families opportunities to share information about their children and their history and be able to let parents ask questions,” Ward said.

The district does hold “back-to-school nights,” Ward said, but she added that usually involves a big group of people together all at once. WaKIDS will provide the chance for parents and teachers to get to know each other better. “This way, teachers will have more information, and the parents will have a connection and greater comfort level with the teacher,” said Ward.

Whole-child assessment takes place two-to-three weeks after the school year has started, Ward said, and is an assessment of the student’s “physical and emotional development, their learning skills (and) gives you a whole picture of the child and how they are doing. It gives the teacher a lot of information early on to best plan programming for the kids.”

Early learning collaboration, according to Ward, consists of outreach and collaboration between the elementary schools and preschools and daycares in the community. Ward said this component is making sure “people are all working toward the same goals, and we are doing everything we can to make sure families and children are ready for that kindergarten experience.”

Kindergarten teachers will be going to a two-day workshop to be trained in the assessment and “get an overview of the entire WaKIDS philosophy and the requirements,” Ward said. She said that this program “makes perfect sense.”

“It is something, even before WaKIDS, we’ve wanted,” she added. “This assessment will provide a much bigger picture of each individual child.”