A plan to offer low-income children in the Palo Alto school district a "crash course in kindergarten readiness" won applause from the Board of Education Tuesday night.

The board is expected to approve the plan at its Oct. 27 meeting.

The proposed "Springboard to Kindergarten" would identify children who lack a solid pre-K foundation when they register for kindergarten in January and February.

Forty children would enroll in a five-day-a-week program stressing social-emotional skill-building. The program would run from February to August, when they would begin kindergarten.

"The main focus will be on social-emotional (skills) because that's what the research shows young children need to be successful in the classroom," Sharon Keplinger, director of the school district's popular Young Fives program, said of Springboard.

"I really hope for these kids that this is it -- they will be able to be where everyone else is. They won't need all this intervention later."

Keplinger would manage the program in two classrooms at Greendell School, the location of Young Fives. Classroom space there is being vacated by the Jewish Community Center, which is moving to its new home at the Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life.

Liz Simons of Palo Alto, whose family foundation, the Heising-Simons foundation, largely will underwrite the three-year pilot, told board members about a similar program the foundation funded in Mountain View this summer.

"I think it is wonderful that in Palo Alto you have the opportunity to do this," she said, adding that her own children, now 17 and 19, were graduates of Young Fives.

"I have a tremendous amount of confidence in Sharon," she said.

Keplinger and others pointed to extensive research showing that kindergarten readiness has a significant impact on the long-term success of a child in school.

Only 13 percent of low-income children have a high-quality pre-school experience, while 80 percent of children with parents earning more than $100,000 have it, she said.

If the program is approved Oct. 27, Keplinger said she plans to advertise for teachers in November; hire and work on materials in December; contact parents and recruit students and assess readiness in January; begin the program in February, and run it until mid-August.

Board members thanked Simons for her generosity and expressed enthusiasm for the program.

"We haven't had the kind of success we want with disadvantaged kids," board member Melissa Baten Caswell said. "Early intervention is probably the best investment we can make in this district."

In other business Tuesday, the board discussed detailed statistics on K-8 student achievement.

They applauded the news that Palo Alto ranks fourth among California's K-12 districts as measured by the state Academic Performance Index. But they expressed concern at the slower academic progress of some minority subgroups.

"While we're all happy with the results in general, the results (among low-income and certain minority students) are cause for dismay," Superintendent Kevin Skelly said. A five-point drop among our African-American students -- we need to do a better job.

"I don't think it's because people don't care about this. We just don't have the right answer yet. Besides the data we need to look at teacher expectations as far as the classroom environment. Parent involvement is important, and also a longer school day.

"Based on research these things have the potential of yielding positive results for our kids."

Audience member Brian Ford asked why African-American and Hispanic students in the Manhattan Beach and San Ramon districts, which rank fifth and sixth in California, have API scores that are more than 100 points higher than African-American and Hispanic students in Palo Alto.

Skelly said he did not have a good answer but would look into it, adding that Stanford's Center for Research in Educational Outcomes is also analyzing the Palo Alto data.

On the other end, board member Barbara Klausner questioned whether the data offer sufficient information as to whether the district's top-achieving students are being adequately challenged.