During this election season, I have covered voter forums and there are many hot issues that the candidates get asked about. One of the topics that inevitably came up is our failing education system. Whether it is national or state races, all candidates agree that something has to be done.

But when pressed, there aren’t too many candidates with creative solutions to the problem.

The issue has a place in my life as my 4-year-old son prepares to enter the public education system next fall. It also affects me personally, as I feel the system failed me. I was also allowed to graduate high school without one of the required English classes and relied on an extra year of community college to catch up and prepare to attend a university.

But in talking with education professionals and listening to politicians during the past two months, I have come up with an idea as a start to reforming the public school system.

Some may call it radical.

But one of the biggest elements to my idea is getting rid of 11th and 12th grade as we know it. Do I have your attention yet?

But let me start at the beginning — literally.

Most education professionals agree that the most important time in a child’s life, when they are the most susceptible to learning, is when they are young and not even in school yet. Anyone who has a child knows they are a sponge for information at a very young age.

Most kids at age 3 have the ability to start learning to read, do math and learn about their surroundings at an exponential rate. That is two years earlier than most kids start kindergarden.

Furthermore, many families with the means to send their children to a Montessori school or a preschool take advantage of this critical time. But many families do not necessarily have the monetary means to do this.

Most kids who have the advantage of a Motessori are far more prepared for kindergarten than those who do not and spend the first year or two unchallenged by a system trying to get their classmates up to par.

What if we shifted the 13-year public school term back two years in a child’s life?

Start kids at 3 and not 5 years old. Implement the Montessori style of teaching for some kids and for others use a more structured environment to teach them early. Get all kids reading, doing simple math and knowing geography before they are 5 instead of starting at age 5. By doing this, kids would learn the normal curriculum much faster as they are sponges at those ages.

The idea is to be able to teach the normal curriculum in an expedited manner, so kids would be two years ahead of the current schedule.

One benefit would be to teach kids in a public environment when they are “sponges” and not distracted by learning to drive, hormonal changes and all the things that go along with being a 17- or 18-year-old.

Finishing public education at 15 or 16 has some issues as far as maturity levels are concerned. But there is no reason to stop public education there. There is also no reason to pay for it. Make kids complete a six-month to two-year internship with a local business, city government, public elementary or a nonprofit. Eight hours a week would suffice. Enough time to make a difference, pay back the community for their public education and still hold a job. Since they have already finished their public education, they could also move on to a university and complete their internship in those communities or join the work force.

That idea of having “high-school graduates” join the work force earlier also helps out society in other ways. It would artificially move the retirement age back two years, giving graduates more time to save for retirement and help to make the social security system bridge the baby boomer gap.

On the other end, it would help out working families. It would provide school at an earlier age. This would not eliminate the need for day care or other preschools, but it would decrease the need, saving families money at a time when most families are just starting out.

I am the first to admit that this is not an easy fix or a cheap one. But no solution will be cheap. It would mean providing essentially 15 grades of public education for 12 years. We currently teach 13 grades of education, if you include kindergarten.

There would need to be more teachers hired for early education than what we currently have teaching 11th and 12th grade. But it would be an amazing investment in our future. Implementing the Montessori style of teaching is also not cheap. In Montessori teaching, there are specialized learning tools that have to be in the classroom. But then again we have wood shop, metal shop and other creative classes in our high schools and community colleges that could help out in manufacturing these items.

This solution would have far-reaching effects on our society and I am sure there are elements that can picked apart. But we will never solve this problem if we do not come up with creative solutions.

Bothell resident Matt Phelps writes for the Kirkland Reporter.