The benefits of all-day kindergarten are increasingly supported by educational policy groups. Rigorous, prospective empirical research is impractical for schools of limited fiscal means where education must take priority over institutional research. However, post-hoc analyses of archival and informal measures can provide invaluable information concerning educational issues of national concern. A method of university and elementary school collaboration was employed in evaluating the educational effects of a transition from half-day to full-day kindergarten in an economically challenged suburban-rural school district in Maine. A child developmental scale and educational measures were used to evaluate differences in improvement scores between children enrolled in half-day kindergarten one year and children enrolled in full-day kindergarten the following year. Additional measures addressed parent and teacher attitudes toward full-day kindergarten. Overall, children enrolled in full-day kindergarten showed greater improvement than children in half-day kindergarten. Results of teacher and parent questionnaires indicated a high degree of satisfaction with full-day kindergarten. The research effort, based on a service learning model, provided a cost-effective strategy for recovering and analyzing archival data.