NORTH PROVIDENCE — Parents urged the School Committee last night to find a way to offer all-day kindergarten. Members of the panel signaled they might be ready to consider it.

“Certainly having 5½ hours of education as opposed to two hours is much better. There’s no question about that,” said School Committee member Frank W. Pallotta Jr., a former superintendent of schools in Lincoln and now principal of a Catholic school. “This has been pending business for a long time, and maybe the time has come to take a hard look at that.”

The pitch for making kindergarten all-day came from William G. Floriani and his daughter, Gina Picard, principal of Robert F. Kennedy Elementary School in Providence. Picard’s 5-year-old son attends morning kindergarten at Stephen Olney School.

Picard, who was later joined by Donna Alqassar and Nora Hixon, also parents of kindergarten students, said research shows that youngsters should have 90 minutes a day set aside for reading alone and 20 minutes for each new skill that they learn. That, she said, is difficult when the teacher is limited to three hours in the morning session, which is supposed to include art and physical education, and two hours in the afternoon.

“Patrick’s teacher does a very good job, the best that she can within the few hours she has,” Picard said. But knowing how important it is to have a foundation in reading, Picard said she supplements the classroom instruction by teaching her child at home.

“The kindergarten is the foundation, and unless we do something to build it up, we create problems for the future,” she said. “The children at that age are wide-eyed and ready to learn.”

School Supt. Donna Ottaviano said she believed it would be a good idea to have study group look at the idea but cautioned that setting up an all-day kindergarten program in every school could be costly,, including adding classrooms and hiring teachers.

Picard countered that by thinking “outside the box,” school officials could find solutions. For example, she said, the two half-day programs at Stephen Olney have no more than 26 students combined. She suggested that the department could combine the two classes and immediately offer a full-day program. Without the extra bus run at midday, she said, the department might save enough to hire an administrative aide. .

Picard’s father said school officials should also think about the hardship that half-day sessions inflict on single parents who have to find child care for their youngsters while they are working and when their children are back from school.

Pallotta said noted that Johnston has full-day kindergarten in some schools, and some districts make the all-day program available based on a lottery.

“It might behoove the committee to put a study group together and identify the spaces that could be used, attaching a fiscal note to that,” he said. “The third part of that is having the political will.”

“I would say off the top of my head, we could not afford to put a full-day K in every school building because it would require a shift in financial thinking in how the budget priorities are developed. But certainly we can begin the process.”

Member Helen Reall said school officials should begin exploring what classroom space may be available, while committee chairman Anthony Marciano urged parents to begin lobbying members of the state’s congressional delegation to see if they can get more money for kindergarten.

“You can go to Sheldon Whitehouse and Patrick Kennedy,” Marciano said. “After all, during the campaign, a lot of promises were made.”