For the first time, the state Department of Education is venturing into early childhood education by launching a small, high-quality pre-kindergarten program designed to level the playing field for low-income children who now start school at a significant disadvantage compared with middle- and upper-income students.

Until now, Rhode Island has failed to support the notion of public early childhood education. It is one of just 12 states that does not offer public pre-K.

But in September, the state will open four to six pilot pre-kindergarten classrooms that will serve between 72 and 108 four-year-olds in urban communities. Officials say that the best-known approaches and qualified teachers will be used in these demonstration classrooms.

“Quality is everything,” said Robert G. Flanders Jr., chairman of the Board of Regents for Elementary and Secondary Education. “We are not just talking about daycare, but a quality preschool environment where learning takes place according to certain standards. So it’s terribly important that any program we initiate has quality factors built in and has certified instructors who have the appropriate skills to deal with early learning, and not just people who are good babysitters.”

The pilot program is made possible by a hard-fought $700,000 allocation in the 2009-2010 budget.

Twenty private preschools and sites for the federally funded Head Start preschool program applied to become demonstration classrooms. The state Department of Education, which will oversee the pilot pre-K program, will announce the selected sites soon, said department spokesman Elliot Krieger.

If the pilot is successful, education officials hope to expand public pre-kindergarten. The department is budgeting $9,300 per child for the demonstration classrooms.

Recently, President Obama has underscored the importance of early childhood programs for children from birth through age 5, announcing his intent to pump $10 billion into improving the quality of early learning programs across the country.

National studies show that low-income children already dramatically trail middle- and upper-income children in vocabulary and other school readiness measures by they time they enter kindergarten. This finding is particularly significant for Rhode Island, where nearly half the state’s 40,468 poor children live in extreme poverty, defined as a family of three with an income lower than $8,673 a year.

“We talk a lot about achievement gaps,” said Education Commissioner Deborah Gist. “But when children come to school with such widely varying levels, what we really have is a preparation gap that exists before they even start school.”

Yet despite the fact that 17.5 percent of the state’s children under the age of 18 were living in poverty in 2007 — a number that has likely risen during the recession — Rhode Island has not offered a public pre-kindergarten program.

In contrast, both Connecticut and Massachusetts, high-achieving neighboring states, do offer such programs. A handful of places, including Oklahoma, Georgia and Washington, D.C., offer universal preschool to all four-year-olds, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).

“We know that high-quality pre-K is a proven strategy for helping to close the achievement gap that appears as early as kindergarten entry,” said Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island’s Kids Count, a nonprofit children’s advocacy organization. “We no longer want to be behind the rest of the country in terms of readiness of our children.”

Getting children off on the right foot can help increase reading and math scores as students progress through the school system and lead to higher high school graduation rates, Bryant said. “We see [pre-kindergarten] as a core economic as well as educational strategy, even in these difficult economic times,” she said. “There are some investments that yield big dividends down the road, and this is one of them.”

The demonstration classrooms will adhere to 10 national benchmarks that help to ensure high quality. These include requiring that all pre-K teachers hold a bachelor’s degree with a specialization in early childhood; that class size is 20 or fewer students; that the staff-to-child ratio is 1:10 or better; that children are screened for vision, hearing and health and are referred to support services; and that the sites are monitored.

The state Education Department is hiring a team of early childhood specialists who will work with teachers at the selected centers throughout the school year and provide training, said Michele Palermo, early childhood coordinator at the department. In addition, the national institute will measure the gains the students have made in language, literacy, early mathematics, and social and emotional development, and report the results publicly.

“We must continue to make the case for why an investment in early childhood is so important, even in tough budget times,” Gist said. “That’s why the study will be so important. Also, it’s important to have classrooms to take people to and say, ‘this is what a high-quality pre-K classroom looks like.’ ”

jjordan@projo.com