Salem school officials said a proposed amendment to the public kindergarten mandate allowing districts to temporarily contract with private establishments will neither hasten nor simplify the road to establishing kindergarten programs.

Superintendent Michael Delahanty said the proposal, which included reimbursing per-student costs to private kindergarten establishments and leveling out curriculum among them, is unrealistic.

“It’s an impractical solution,” Delahanty said, adding the school administrative unit, SAU 28, would not be ready to tackle standardizing the curriculum among even a few of the private kindergartens.

The Salem School Board has had a committee in place to explore how to properly execute public kindergarten since before the legislation mandating it came forward in July 2007. Delahanty said there are 16 private kindergartens in town that Salem parents send their children to, but Salem children also attend kindergarten in 16 other communities and in seven Massachusetts towns.

After the state Legislature passed a bill declaring public kindergarten as part of an adequate education, several districts in the state without such a program, including Salem, were charged with establishing kindergarten by 2009.

Some of the districts have voiced discontent with the bill, calling it an unfunded mandate and saying instituting public kindergarten is a community-level issue, not a state decision, and one voters should make at the polls.

The proposed amendment, drafted by state Representatives Lynne Ober and Peter Leishman, includes several options aimed at making the transition to public kindergarten less bumpy, said Ober.

“We wanted to spark some creative thinking,” said Ober, adding the list of options includes refunding 100 percent in state construction aid for districts; keeping the construction reimbursement at 75 percent while pushing the deadline back a few years; and allowing districts to contract with private kindergartens that employ certified teachers.

The state would cover $1,200 per kindergarten student, the same amount public school districts who set their public kindergarten up by the 2009 deadline would get, for the state’s accepted two and a half total hours of class time per day.

Delahanty said privatizing kindergarten, even temporarily, would prevent the sort of input that comes from voters through the polls.

“When you send your dollars to a private source, now you lose all control and there’s not that same oversight,” Delahanty said.

It would also make creating a public kindergarten program difficult as people see the private facilities they currently send their kids to, often near their work place, as a sufficient alternative, Delahanty said.

“We can’t gain support for our kindergarten if a program that people think is sufficiently addressing the need is in place,” he said. “I want to do it in a way that’s going to be accepted by the community.”

Using the common practice among neighboring towns of estimating the amount of kindergarten students in the school district by using 80 percent of the year’s first-grade enrollment, currently sitting at about 330 in Salem, the projected amount of kindergartners in Salem is between 260 and 270 children, Delahanty said.

School Board Chairman Robert Bryant said the board is working out a plan for setting up kindergarten, but added he is also not pleased with the way the state has handled it, and further does not think privatizing kindergarten would help communities. Bryant also voiced reservations about how the school district would be able to handle supervising the private kindergartens, adding there is not enough staff and that curriculum would suffer.

“Under what curriculum will they all be teaching?” Bryant asked of the different teachers in separate private establishments.

It would also be difficult, particularly for Salem, to decide which private kindergartens would get the contracts, taking into account location, size and a host of other factors.

“I think the state got a little single-minded and just walked in a straight line and said we’re going to kindergarten, follow us there or else you’re going to have problems with us in 2009,” Bryant said.