MONTREAL—Four-year-olds will be going to school in dozens of poor neighbourhoods across the province. Quebec is introducing earlier kindergarten classes for 1,200 low-income children this September.

The government hopes that starting school at a younger age will encourage children to stay in school longer and improve the province's high school graduation rate.

“This is another means to fight against poverty in families and children,” said Premier Pauline Marois on Thursday.

In the first year, 68 school boards will each be allowed to select one of their schools and pick 18 students for one class. Education Minister Marie Malavoy said the measure will impact some of the province's poorest neighbourhoods.

Parents will not be forced to send their children to school, but they should soon get notices from their school boards that the new kindergarten program will be available.

The government is pumping an additional $8.1 million into school budgets for the program.

The English Montreal School Board welcomes the move.

“Once we expose them to a school environment, can we say that it will benefit the children in the long run, the answer to that is yes, the answer to that is yes,” said EMSB vice-chair Sylvia Lo Bianco.

The EMSB has several schools that qualify as low-income. Right now children start kindergarten at age five. According to Malavoy, a lot of them arrive with learning difficulties.

Many children coming from disadvantaged areas when they reach school they don't have what they need to succeed,” said the education minister. “What is really bad is the label you have when you begin to feel yourself as incompetent or unable to succeed.”

She says earlier kindergarten will help reduce Quebec’s high school dropout rate, more than a third of students don't finish high school on time.

Malavoy said she is not worried parents will feel any stigma for being asked to participate in the voluntary program.

“They still won’t choose the daycare, but if we offer them something linked to school because they have a good, they think school is a good thing for their child I think they will accept it,” she said.

The government wants to expand early kindergarten every year for seven years, until it includes 8,000 students at a cost of $50 million annually. A small price to pay, it says, for a brighter future.