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 information is reported in aggregated and disaggregated form for the state and the 24 counties. 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. In general, girls were more ready for kindergarten work than were boys. In addition, the report provides information about the rationale for using WSS for reporting baseline information as well as data collection and reporting procedures. Three appendices include the selected indicators from the WSS kindergarten checklist, state and county data, and a table delineating the number of participating teachers and students from each county. (KB)