Why don’t schools make you just through some hoops for redshirting?
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Anonymous
Rare. The vast, vast majority of redshirted kids graduate at 18. The one I know who will graduate at 19 had severe medical issues that caused him to miss a lot of school when he was young. If they’re graduating at that age there’s usually a reason. |
Anonymous
+1 Pretty much all the redshirted kids I know are summer boys. They will be 18 at graduation. Even if they turn 19 in May-June few will notice or care with all of the graduation and end of school year stuff. All the other cases we know are outliers (medical issues, or were held back in school to repeat K or 1st). We know a boy who will turn 19 in January of his senior year when the time comes…he is totally fine now but was in the hospital for months (years?) on and off when he was a preschooler due to severe medical issues. Started late for that reason. The family doesn’t like to discuss it, so most new classmates etc would not know the backstory. They would just see a strong smart healthy boy and think the parents were trying to “cheat” |
Anonymous
And they are 19 by the time they begin college, or shortly afterwards. |
Anonymous
My kid is one of the younger ones in the class and I do not care that other kids were redshirted. My kid has not been impacted at all. Personally, I think anti-redshirters are some of the most ridiculous drama queen parents out there, as a group. I am embarrassed for them; I can’t imagine how their kids feel. |
Anonymous
You know, I suspect you are completely correct that you’d hold a lifetime grudge over that. You are probably still holding a lot of grudges from elementary school. |
Anonymous
Why do you think this is a reasonable position? PP is demanding that cash-strapped school districts across the entire country implement an entire assessment protocol, presumably to be administered by costly specialist evaluators, to solve something that very few people and districts seem to think is a problem. There is no widespread evidence of harm from redshirting and there are very few kids redshirted who are outside PPs three-month window. If there was actually a problem here, school districts could implement a strict cutoff rule, like NYC has, no expensive assessments needed. However, very few districts nationally have followed NYC’s approach. I genuinely do not understand what is “reasonable” about demanding an entire regulatory apparatus be installed in school districts across the country. What PP wants is probably millions of dollars per district, by the time it’s up and running. That’s millions of dollars that could be spent on education, just so PPs kid doesn’t encounter a kid that is older than PPs kid. Could you explain why you think that’s reasonable? It seems wildly and somewhat insanely unreasonable to me. |
Anonymous
So? People of all ages attend college |
Anonymous
I lived in a place that used to do this. Every kid came in for an evaluation the summer before they were supposed to be starting 1st (no public kindergarten). Some kids were asked to delay 1st by a year and attend a public "readiness" program, essentially redshirting them. It seemed to work pretty well, but did mean that there were a good number of older "readiness" kids in each grade (probably 10-15%). |
Anonymous
I don’t think eliminating public kindergarten in favor of “readiness programs” and evaluations of readiness is at all a good idea. |
Anonymous
Yes, but we are talking about Freshman living in dorms are mostly 18. |
Anonymous
Mine will graduate at 17, and be 17 for a few weeks in college. |
Anonymous
I don't think PP was suggesting eliminating public kindergarten. She's just saying that back when districts didn't have public kindergarten, it was more typical for there to be a readiness assessment. Now kindergarten is pretty standard in public schools, but we still have issues with readiness determinations, as evidenced by this conversation. I think there is an argument that there should still be some kind of determination of readiness, though questions about who should make it and when. This isn't an anti-redshirt position, by the way. Readiness assessments are actually pretty explicitly pro-redshirt because they acknowledge upfront that not all 5 year olds are ready for kindergarten. Districts that have strict no redshirt policies (like DCPS, for instance) would not be open to readiness assessments because they would be seen as explicitly inequitable -- the kids most likely to be deemed not ready would likely come from the families for whom waiting to enroll would be most burdensome. DCPS gets around this now with a public preschool program which both helps prepare kids for elementary (including kids who otherwise would not have access to that kind of predatory experience) while also locking kids into a age progression that is pretty strict and makes redshirting almost impossible. |
Anonymous
Uh, I'm PP and I'm not "demanding" anything of the sort. The vast majority of parents don't want to redshirt, and of those that do, most of the time the kids are summer birthdays. My suggestion (actually OP's suggestion, I just happen to agree with it) is that outside maybe a 3 month window, redshirting should require some kind process. So this means that for the small handful of students each year whose parents want to redshirt them even though they will be a minimum of 5 years and 3 months on September 1st, the parents have the option of (1) providing documentation from their own pediatrician/behavioral psychologist/etc. showing a delay that merits a delayed start, or (2) asking a district counselor to assess the child. This would really not be enormously burdensome because we are talking about a small percentage of the overall school population, and most parents in this category who want to redshirt likely would already have the documentation necessary. But the advantage of this approach is that it would discourage anyone hoping to game the system by redshirting a winter or spring birthday without any documentation. Most parents send their kids on time and most prefer to do so. |
Anonymous
…no one is “gaming the system” by sending a winter or spring birthday. This narrative of victimization just ignores the facts which are…the rules say you have to send by 6. That’s it. Those are the rules. I’m sorry you don’t like them, but the idea that people following the rules that exist for everyone are somehow hurting you is something you should work through in therapy not public policy. |
Anonymous
The rules say send by 6, not start kindergarten at 6. A child isn’t required to attend kindergarten. A child can skip it and enter first grade at 6. If a child is entering school for the first time at 6.5, they probably should be evaluated to see if they’re better suited for kindergarten or 1st. |