I read with great weariness the controversy and series of letters to town newspapers about the installation of full-day kindergarten in which authors decry the costs to town residents: too expensive these folks say.

My young growing family moved to Westfield in 1983. We were immediately caught up in this same longtime ongoing controversy and joined efforts then to try to install full-day kindergarten. At that time arguments against it were made not only because of expense, but because it was considered unnecessary since it was thought that only a limited number of Westfield mothers worked outside the home. Recall this was at a time when full-day daycare facilities were rare, and women who worked away from home were often made to feel that they were “abandoning” their children to daycare.

Westfield is now the only district in Union County without full-day kindergarten and only 1 of 10 in the state without such a program of the total of 608 public and charter school districts. Gov. Murphy has not only supported a bill to mandate such a free full-day kindergarten program for all NJ districts, but he has also supported a mandate for universal, free pre-K programs for 3- and 4-year-olds.

The irony in all this is that this is not a radical new idea. My mother grew up in the 1920s in Chicago and had full-day kindergarten. Our family in the early ‘50s moved to a close-in Chicago bedroom suburb with a similar demographic to and even smaller size than Westfield. This town not only had full-day kindergarten but also had free public pre-K programs that were instituted in the late 1940s.

Now more than 40 years after we moved to Westfield, few residents here would question the importance of ubiquitous daycare opportunities, and few knowing the importance of early childhood education would question the developmental value of full-day kindergarten. When almost all of the other school districts in the state can afford the cost of full-day kindergarten, it’s time to stop the bickering of whether Westfield can afford to offer our children the same opportunity. Please support the referendum and funding necessary to institute this long overdue program.

Douglas K. Miller Westfield