Just another redshirting vent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you could only redshirt for documented reasons then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Then talk to your elected officials (for public school) or school administration (for private school) about changing the laws/rules.

+1. I have never understood how worked up people get about this but if you feel so strongly about redshirting, reach out to your school board and demand change.

Why do you assume those of us unhappy with the inappropriate developmental standards are not reaching out to the schools, school board, and anywhere else we can?

Do you assume the people on the politics section of the site complaining about everything under the sun are also not attempting to make changes?

It would be more honest if you just said "These people make me uncomfortable and I wish they would shut up." Or you could not read the thread.

Are you a person who thinks that parents should only be allowed to redshirt for documented reasons?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you could only redshirt for documented reasons then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Then talk to your elected officials (for public school) or school administration (for private school) about changing the laws/rules.

+1. I have never understood how worked up people get about this but if you feel so strongly about redshirting, reach out to your school board and demand change.

Why do you assume those of us unhappy with the inappropriate developmental standards are not reaching out to the schools, school board, and anywhere else we can?

Do you assume the people on the politics section of the site complaining about everything under the sun are also not attempting to make changes?

It would be more honest if you just said "These people make me uncomfortable and I wish they would shut up." Or you could not read the thread.

Are you a person who thinks that parents should only be allowed to redshirt for documented reasons?

Nope.

Nor do I think parents should only be allowed to homeschool, send their children to a charter, or send their children to a private school for documented reasons.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it DOES come down to not wanting your child to be the youngest in the class. It always comes through in the end on these threads

Nope. The only people who say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest are the anti-redshirters.

23:37 was just pointing out that the PP was a jerk.

This is totally illogical. Our kids ARE the youngest if we didn’t redshirt.

To further clarify - we are saying we would like them be the youngest by one year but not more than that.

+1. My daughter started PK3 in DCPS at age 2 (Sept. bday) and it's been fine. She's now a 2nd grader. I don't mind her being the youngest in a 12-month range--she has a couple of friends a year older, and she'll just have to work hard to keep up with older kids physically and academically. What would be a little tough is if she were the youngest in an 18 or 24-month span. This is all hypothetical though, as I only know one kid who is redshirted (and only missed the cutoff by a few days, so he's still basically 12 months older).

Sorry, to clarify--the child had a birthday a few days BEFORE the cutoff so could've gone to K on time, but the parents decided to redshirt. So, the child was in my kid's class for K when technically they should've been in 1st grade.

Missing the cut off is not redshirting. We have several friends who missed the cut off including my child. Some of us went private to start them and some waited a year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So it DOES come down to not wanting your child to be the youngest in the class. It always comes through in the end on these threads

Nope. The only people who say they don’t want their kids to be the youngest are the anti-redshirters.

23:37 was just pointing out that the PP was a jerk.

This is totally illogical. Our kids ARE the youngest if we didn’t redshirt.

To further clarify - we are saying we would like them be the youngest by one year but not more than that.

+1. My daughter started PK3 in DCPS at age 2 (Sept. bday) and it's been fine. She's now a 2nd grader. I don't mind her being the youngest in a 12-month range--she has a couple of friends a year older, and she'll just have to work hard to keep up with older kids physically and academically. What would be a little tough is if she were the youngest in an 18 or 24-month span. This is all hypothetical though, as I only know one kid who is redshirted (and only missed the cutoff by a few days, so he's still basically 12 months older).

Missing the cut off is not redshirting. We have several friends who missed the cut off including my child. Some of us went private to start them and some waited a year.

Sorry, to clarify--the child had a birthday a few days BEFORE the cutoff so could've gone to K on time, but the parents decided to redshirt. So, the child was in my kid's class for K when technically they should've been in 1st grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you could only redshirt for documented reasons then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Then talk to your elected officials (for public school) or school administration (for private school) about changing the laws/rules.

+1. I have never understood how worked up people get about this but if you feel so strongly about redshirting, reach out to your school board and demand change.

Why do you assume those of us unhappy with the inappropriate developmental standards are not reaching out to the schools, school board, and anywhere else we can?

Do you assume the people on the politics section of the site complaining about everything under the sun are also not attempting to make changes?

It would be more honest if you just said "These people make me uncomfortable and I wish they would shut up." Or you could not read the thread.

Are you a person who thinks that parents should only be allowed to redshirt for documented reasons?

Nope.

Nor do I think parents should only be allowed to homeschool, send their children to a charter, or send their children to a private school for documented reasons.

OK, then the comment was not about you. And if it's not about you, why make it about you?

[Anonymous]

It's really amazing how this topic can rile people up so much. I would really like to know where these schools are that have an 18 month spread in their classes/grades. My July girl was not redshirted, we never seriously considered it. She is consistently among the youngest in her grade, but I don't think there are any kids who are more than 12 months older than her. I haven't encountered any kids in her class having May-June birthdays who are 14 mos older than her rather than 2 mos older. I would not be surprised if many classes have a 13-14 month spread, but 18? Where are these schools? And if they're private, well, you can always choose a different school if you don't like how they run things.

[Anonymous]

The truly mindblowing thing here is that this whine-fest started over a kid who is in BALTIMORE PRIVATE SCHOOL.

For those who are unfamiliar: ALL Baltimore independents funnel ALL summer birthdays into a "pre-first" or "prep first" or "6th age" or whatever grade. Parents can and do object, and most schools allow parents' wishes to override -- but that's an exception, not the rule. The default is for summer birthday kids to go into a pre-first year.

What Baltimore independents do is, effectively, to change the cutoff dates, that's all. They haven't magically made a classroom with a 2-year span.

The only way for anti-redshirters to be affected by this at all is if:
1) They enroll their child in a Baltimore independent school; AND
2) They choose not to follow the school's recommendation for placement.

Otherwise, their little non-redshirted Larla will be in a class with approximately a 12-mo spread, with one or two outliers.

People lose their g**dm minds when redshirting comes up, but Baltimore private schools are the least "harmful" case of redshirting ever, even given the dubious standards of harm that anti-redshirters employ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents who are competitive enough to worry about whether other kids are redshirted don't send their kids to Montessori schools.

I just think it is “rich” that the pro redshirters are calling the anti-redshirters competitive.

It's true, though. Anti-redshirters are upset that their children are at some imagined competitive disadvantage - although, paradoxically, many also pay lipservice to believing that redshirting impairs development. It's never been clear to me whether this is just a lack of logic or a cynical attempt to pretend that what they believe is in their own self-interest (no redshirting) is also in the interests of the children who would otherwise be redshirted.

They're the ones doing the comparing, not the redshirting parents. If everyone just made decisions based on what's best for their own kid, and didn't worry about what everyone else was doing, there would be none of this ridiculousness.

The redshirted parents compared enough to hold their own kid back and it wasn’t a decision that was in a vacuum without effect on making other kids younger for the grade.

Anti redshirters may be competitive but not competitive enough to hold their own kids back.

Juuuuuuuuuust competitive enough to complain on the internet. Got it!

Now you’ve got it. I can’t even complain IRL because my friends do it. But having a young for the grade kid, I experienced things others might not have experienced and often barriers can be invisible to those who don’t face them so I do speak up online.

What specifically has your child experienced?

My child is the correct age for grade, but the youngest in her grade by a few months. She attends a school where redshirting is rampant, and has a late summer birthday. The age range in her class is about 18 months. Not only is she the youngest, but there is a gap. The next youngest child is a couple months older than her, and then another gap and then finally a more even distribution. The youngest quarter of the kids in the class span 6 months worth of birthdays, leaving 3/4 of the kids in oldest 2/3rds of the age range. There are more redshirted summer birthdays than correct age for grade summer birthdays.

In the younger grades, this meant when my child was behaving in age appropriate manners, her behavior stood out as "immature" because when you're 5, 6+ mos of development for an average child can make a huge difference. The academic and behavior standards were geared to the older cohort of kids, since they were the majority. The younger kids were expected to keep up and reach that standard as well.

In K and 1st, when writing samples were put up on the wall, my child was well aware that her writing was not nearly as neat as the children who were a year, a year and a half older than her. And having almost no close in age peers meant seeing very few other samples of children at a similar level. The same held true for other situations.

Fortunately, these extreme differences close up fairly quickly. While a 6 mos gap at 5 years old is large, it can often be developmentally invisible by 7. It was still obvious the class was geared to the older children, because they were the overwhelming majority, but the differences were less obvious to the kids so there were fewer instances of the youngest children being called or treated like "babies" by the oldest kids.

By 3rd grade, for my child, you couldn't tell a difference at all. And not redshirting has been fantastic for my DC. She has grit like you wouldn't believe because of being in such an uneven environment her first few years, and working hard to meet a standard that was usually above her ability. If she'd been a particularly easy to discourage child, we probably would have seen negative results from this instead of positive, but fortunately she took on the challenge rather than internalizing the gap.

When you have classes that are inappropriate for the age range they are supposed to teach, some parents are going to respond by setting their children up for success and getting their children as close as possible to the age that the class is geared for. Schools need to either modify their curriculum so it's age appropriate, or change the age ranges so they're getting the ages they want to get. Parents shouldn't be left doing this on an ad hoc basis. It just privileges the well off because they're the ones who can afford to keep kids home for an extra year. And it penalizes the less well off, because their kids are being held to an inappropriate standard that's being reinforced by the growing tendency towards redshirting.

This is the actual issue. If we had half-day, play-based Kindergarten you'd see redshirting go way down. But K is now 1st grade. That's why we waited until our child was 5 (turning 6) instead of 4 (turning 5) to start K.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's really amazing how this topic can rile people up so much. I would really like to know where these schools are that have an 18 month spread in their classes/grades. My July girl was not redshirted, we never seriously considered it. She is consistently among the youngest in her grade, but I don't think there are any kids who are more than 12 months older than her. I haven't encountered any kids in her class having May-June birthdays who are 14 mos older than her rather than 2 mos older. I would not be surprised if many classes have a 13-14 month spread, but 18? Where are these schools? And if they're private, well, you can always choose a different school if you don't like how they run things.

+1

I don't think it's all that common in the DC area, outside of private schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kids are curious and naturally find sameness and differences amongst one another. Birthdays/are are a natural topic of discussion for kids. Have you ever driven a carpool? Kids know who is the tallest/fastest/oldest/youngest/who has the most siblings/dogs, etc. As they get older information about age becomes more relevant to them for different reasons - academically, physically, and socially.

There are some competitive parents who find out ages and don’t hesitate to share that info with other parents but my experience is that kids already know.

I’ve chaperoned two class outings where the leader innocently asks for ages at the start of the program (“so, you are all 8 and 9?”) and kids, being literal little creatures, make sure to point specific ages - at one gathering they all pointed to one child and said no, he’s x age (older)! Not to be mean, just to give a correct answer to the leader.

Yes but there is no stigma to it unless parents provide one. Just facts, like eye color and hair color. I am seriously worried about struggling kids who were held back then facing a parent backlash because no one can myob around here.

+1

The only ones making this negative are the jerk parents - they influence their kids. MYOB.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
If you could only redshirt for documented reasons then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Then talk to your elected officials (for public school) or school administration (for private school) about changing the laws/rules.

+1. I have never understood how worked up people get about this but if you feel so strongly about redshirting, reach out to your school board and demand change.

Why do you assume those of us unhappy with the inappropriate developmental standards are not reaching out to the schools, school board, and anywhere else we can?

Do you assume the people on the politics section of the site complaining about everything under the sun are also not attempting to make changes?

It would be more honest if you just said "These people make me uncomfortable and I wish they would shut up." Or you could not read the thread.

Are you a person who thinks that parents should only be allowed to redshirt for documented reasons?

Nope.

Nor do I think parents should only be allowed to homeschool, send their children to a charter, or send their children to a private school for documented reasons.

OK, then the comment was not about you. And if it's not about you, why make it about you?

Because I get worked up about redshirting because I think it's a sign of a major problem with our schools. And I vent about it here. And I actively work to make changes in the real world.

I bet there's a good chance at least some "document reasons" PPs do as well.

If you don't like reading redshirting vents, why do you read them?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The truly mindblowing thing here is that this whine-fest started over a kid who is in BALTIMORE PRIVATE SCHOOL.

For those who are unfamiliar: ALL Baltimore independents funnel ALL summer birthdays into a "pre-first" or "prep first" or "6th age" or whatever grade. Parents can and do object, and most schools allow parents' wishes to override -- but that's an exception, not the rule. The default is for summer birthday kids to go into a pre-first year.

What Baltimore independents do is, effectively, to change the cutoff dates, that's all. They haven't magically made a classroom with a 2-year span.

The only way for anti-redshirters to be affected by this at all is if:
1) They enroll their child in a Baltimore independent school; AND
2) They choose not to follow the school's recommendation for placement.

Otherwise, their little non-redshirted Larla will be in a class with approximately a 12-mo spread, with one or two outliers.

People lose their g**dm minds when redshirting comes up, but Baltimore private schools are the least "harmful" case of redshirting ever, even given the dubious standards of harm that anti-redshirters employ.

If everyone entered Baltimore privates in K, then you'd be correct. Parents of children who enter after that point may not have been aware of the pre-first pattern, and can be blindsided.

At that point, schools are accepting children based on more data so birthdays don't loom as large when it comes to placement and a summer birthday kid can end up in the "correct" grade instead of recommended for the grade below.

But in general, I agree with you. In Baltimore privates, if you have a summer birthday kid, he or she is doing pre-first, and may do pre-first if there are other issues. It's an entirely normal part of the progression, and the weird kids are not the old-for-grade kids but the on-time summer birthday kids or the rare grade skippers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The truly mindblowing thing here is that this whine-fest started over a kid who is in BALTIMORE PRIVATE SCHOOL.

For those who are unfamiliar: ALL Baltimore independents funnel ALL summer birthdays into a "pre-first" or "prep first" or "6th age" or whatever grade. Parents can and do object, and most schools allow parents' wishes to override -- but that's an exception, not the rule. The default is for summer birthday kids to go into a pre-first year.

What Baltimore independents do is, effectively, to change the cutoff dates, that's all. They haven't magically made a classroom with a 2-year span.

The only way for anti-redshirters to be affected by this at all is if:
1) They enroll their child in a Baltimore independent school; AND
2) They choose not to follow the school's recommendation for placement.

Otherwise, their little non-redshirted Larla will be in a class with approximately a 12-mo spread, with one or two outliers.

People lose their g**dm minds when redshirting comes up, but Baltimore private schools are the least "harmful" case of redshirting ever, even given the dubious standards of harm that anti-redshirters employ.

If everyone entered Baltimore privates in K, then you'd be correct. Parents of children who enter after that point may not have been aware of the pre-first pattern, and can be blindsided.

At that point, schools are accepting children based on more data so birthdays don't loom as large when it comes to placement and a summer birthday kid can end up in the "correct" grade instead of recommended for the grade below.

But in general, I agree with you. In Baltimore privates, if you have a summer birthday kid, he or she is doing pre-first, and may do pre-first if there are other issues. It's an entirely normal part of the progression, and the weird kids are not the old-for-grade kids but the on-time summer birthday kids or the rare grade skippers.

But then the answer to the OP's question is just no, you're not going to encounter this when you send your late summer/fall kid to public school "on time." It's a weird private school thing that will not affect you or your child. They have effectively added a year to K-12 because they can and it's not going to affect you or your kid so who cares.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The truly mindblowing thing here is that this whine-fest started over a kid who is in BALTIMORE PRIVATE SCHOOL.

For those who are unfamiliar: ALL Baltimore independents funnel ALL summer birthdays into a "pre-first" or "prep first" or "6th age" or whatever grade. Parents can and do object, and most schools allow parents' wishes to override -- but that's an exception, not the rule. The default is for summer birthday kids to go into a pre-first year.

What Baltimore independents do is, effectively, to change the cutoff dates, that's all. They haven't magically made a classroom with a 2-year span.

The only way for anti-redshirters to be affected by this at all is if:
1) They enroll their child in a Baltimore independent school; AND
2) They choose not to follow the school's recommendation for placement.

Otherwise, their little non-redshirted Larla will be in a class with approximately a 12-mo spread, with one or two outliers.

People lose their g**dm minds when redshirting comes up, but Baltimore private schools are the least "harmful" case of redshirting ever, even given the dubious standards of harm that anti-redshirters employ.

+1

They don't understand how private school works. And they never can come with any actual data to support their whining.

[Anonymous]

DD has a late July birthday and her independent school strongly recommended redshirting which we ultimately did with some reservations. She is now 9 and in 3rd grade and seems to fit in just fine with her peers. I just learned her classmate is turning 10 on October 1. 10! She would have turned 7 a month and a half into kindergarten. That's just mind blowing to me.