In order to better establish baseline information on the social, physical, linguistic, and cognitive skills of children entering Maryland kindergartens, the state selected the Work Sampling System (WSS), a component of the Maryland Model for School Readiness, as the early childhood assessment system for evaluating entering kindergartners' skills in seven curricular domains. This report provides detailed baseline information on 28 of the 67 WSS performance indicators from a randomized sample of 30 percent of the kindergarten students in each county collected by their teachers during the first few weeks of the 2000-01 school year. The domains assessed by the WSS are: (1) social and personal development; (2) language and literacy; (3) mathematical thinking; (4) scientific thinking; (5) social studies; (6) the arts; and (7) physical development. Findings indicated that 40 percent of entering kindergarten students were rated by their teachers as fully ready for kindergarten work. Fifty percent needed targeted support to meet kindergarten expectations, and 10 percent needed considerable support to do kindergarten work successfully. Most of the support was in language development, mathematical and scientific thinking, and social studies. Girls scored higher than boys in all domains, with smaller gaps in mathematical and scientific thinking. Nearly 27 percent of children with disabilities were fully ready for kindergarten at entry, compared to 41 percent of children with no disabilities. The disaggregation of WSS data for ethnicity and prior early care and education experience was adversely influenced by several data collection and coding errors. The report's three appendices include a list of the selected WSS performance indicators, and county and selected city data. (KB)