Why don’t schools have stronger policies about redshirting?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m not sure where the multiple posters who are claiming that redshirting (within reason) has negative effects on the redshirted child are coming from. I went to a private school with a strict June 1 cutoff for K. I have a July birthday and was required to do a year of transitional K at the school before heading on to K as a new 6 YO. Academically, I was more than ready to start K at 5, and I STILL think that waiting the extra year had long-term benefits.

I was always very advanced in reading and writing (started reading at age 3), but I struggled more with math. It just didn’t come as naturally for me, and I had to work a lot harder to do well in math every single year from elementary school all the way through high school. I’m convinced that if I had been a year younger at each grade level, I probably would have been a B math student. Instead, with the benefit of an extra year, I was able to be an A- math student. (And I worked so much harder for those grades than I worked for any of my As in other subjects.) I ended up going to an Ivy League school for college. Would I have gotten in if I had a string of Bs in math on my HS transcript? Probably not.

Do I think that spring birthdays should be redshirted absent a compelling reason? No - otherwise the age differential in a class gets too wide. However, I think that the posters claiming that redshirting harms children or that being on the older end of the class isn’t actually an advantage are just telling themselves what they want to believe. In most cases, being a bit older absolutely is an advantage. I will likely redshirt my late August birthday daughter.

I'd take the other side of that. I'd rather have a kid be the youngest than the oldest. If I'm trying to get better at tennis, I never want to play someone who is worse than me.

That's my logic and mine is one of the youngest. They are taking advanced classes on top of being the youngest. If they struggle, we help or get them the help they need. Struggling is ok.

Then send your children on time and hope a lot of other parents redshirt?

[Anonymous]

Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

I dont understand this attitude. Why would you want your kid to be the oldest? They will learn nothing in a class full of children a year behind them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

I dont understand this attitude. Why would you want your kid to be the oldest? They will learn nothing in a class full of children a year behind them.

So kids go to high school knowing everything in advance? The oldest kids never have anything to learn? Huh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

I dont understand this attitude. Why would you want your kid to be the oldest? They will learn nothing in a class full of children a year behind them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

I dont understand this attitude. Why would you want your kid to be the oldest? They will learn nothing in a class full of children a year behind them.

DS was born days before the cut off, and we held him. He is not in a class full of children a year behind him. He’s simply on the older end of a class of children born over an approximately 14 month time period. There are a couple of kids older in his grade who are more than a month older than he is, several kids who also have August birthdays, several kids one month younger, several kids two months younger, and so on. And yes, there is ONE child who is a full year younger than he is. In the vast majority of cases, redshirting does not result in a child being placed in “a class full of children a year behind them.” It simply results in them being on the older end of the age distribution instead of at the very youngest end.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Nobody with a brain wants their kid to be the youngest so this is a game that always has losers.

I dont understand this attitude. Why would you want your kid to be the oldest? They will learn nothing in a class full of children a year behind them.

Redshirting a summer kid doesn’t mean they’ll be the oldest— they’re going to be in the older quartile. Their age difference isn’t more significant than the difference between an on time Oct 1 birthday and the rest of the class and there’s no wailing over them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry but my son (August 30) wasn't ready for K at 5. Maybe if schools were different, he would have been. But he wasn't ready to sit on a laptop 5 hours a day, 30 min recess, he couldn't read yet, still wore a pullup at night. If K had been anything like his high quality, play based Pre-K I would have sent him.

At 6 he was perfectly ready for school. He felt confident and a leader in class. He could read, no pullups. Teachers praised his ability to sit still and control himself all year in K.

FWIW I sent my August dd to school on time. She was ready and school is more designed for girls IMO.

What does wearing a pull-up at night have to do with K readiness? That's at home, and there are kids who wear nighttime pull-ups into middle elementary. It's totally irrelevant. He was potty trained during the day, yes? Then it doesn't matter.

LOTS of kids cannot yet read when kindergarten starts. That's what K is for. Yes, some kids might be reading fluently, either because their parents made it happen or because they took to it easily and didn't need to be taught. Most kids will be at the stage where they can recognize letters and associate it with sounds but are either only just sounding out basic words or still figuring out how to translate their knowledge of letters into reading words. And then some kids will still be learning some letters and sounds and be not quite ready to sound out. If your kid was in any of those categories, they were ready for K. Learning to read is one of the main focuses of K, so it's a great place for a kid who needs to learn.

Finally, what the heck kind of school is putting kindergarteners on a laptop for 5 hours a day? That's not appropriate whether your kid is 5 or 6. At this point, some screen time is inevitable (usually tablets, not laptops, as kindergarteners are not expected to have computer skills or to know how to use a mouse).

I don't think redshirting solved any real problems for you. Glad your kid feels like a leader I guess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This all seems very backwards. You want your kid to be the youngest. They will learn the most. The older kids will be bored.

Montessoris often have mixed age classrooms. They'll put first, second and third graders all in the same classroom. They do it so the younger kids learn from the older ones.

+1

It's totally normal at Montessori's to have six, seven, eight and nine year olds in the same class. No one bats at eye at some kids being 3.5 years younger than other kids in their classroom.

They do this at LAMB, Breakthrough, etc. It's a different culture than this apparent obsession in DCPS over which kid is the youngest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To all the pro-RS people claiming their choice doesn’t affect anyone else’s kid—of course it does! It turns young kids who are sent on time into even more of an outlier if some of the kids are over 12 months older. So parents who don’t want to red shirt very much have a stake in the choice other parents on their community make.

I am so thankful that red shirting is uncommon in my area. My summer birthday son is petite for his age but academically advanced and was so ready to go to kindergarten at 5, and I’m glad that there are other boys similar to him in his class and no boys who are 12+ months older than him.

And if that is something you want to avoid, you have the same degree of parental choices as everyone else. My September birthday was in class with someone 12+ months older than her this year and as I mentioned I didn’t know that until well after the school year ended because normal parents make decisions for their kids unrelated to the choices of other parents.

You are making my point exactly—in a community where red shirting is common, I’d have to make the choice between holding my child back so that he fit in better from a size/maturity perspective but was unchallenged by the schoolwork, or sending him on time where he receives appropriate schoolwork but is in a class where he is smaller and less mature than the other kids. From my perspective, this is a lose/lose scenario. Luckily he goes to a private school where red shirting is not common so he is both academically challenged and fits in with his classmates in terms of size and maturity—win/win!

That choice should be a lot easier than some people are making it. You said you have two choices…

1). Hold the child back so he won’t be smaller / less mature than classmates. Unchallenged by the schoolwork.

2). Send the child on time. He will receive appropriate schoolwork but he will be smaller than some of the kids.


Are you seriously claiming that the first one could even be an option?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry but my son (August 30) wasn't ready for K at 5. Maybe if schools were different, he would have been. But he wasn't ready to sit on a laptop 5 hours a day, 30 min recess, he couldn't read yet, still wore a pullup at night. If K had been anything like his high quality, play based Pre-K I would have sent him.

At 6 he was perfectly ready for school. He felt confident and a leader in class. He could read, no pullups. Teachers praised his ability to sit still and control himself all year in K.

FWIW I sent my August dd to school on time. She was ready and school is more designed for girls IMO.

What does wearing a pull-up at night have to do with K readiness? That's at home, and there are kids who wear nighttime pull-ups into middle elementary. It's totally irrelevant. He was potty trained during the day, yes? Then it doesn't matter.

LOTS of kids cannot yet read when kindergarten starts. That's what K is for. Yes, some kids might be reading fluently, either because their parents made it happen or because they took to it easily and didn't need to be taught. Most kids will be at the stage where they can recognize letters and associate it with sounds but are either only just sounding out basic words or still figuring out how to translate their knowledge of letters into reading words. And then some kids will still be learning some letters and sounds and be not quite ready to sound out. If your kid was in any of those categories, they were ready for K. Learning to read is one of the main focuses of K, so it's a great place for a kid who needs to learn.

Finally, what the heck kind of school is putting kindergarteners on a laptop for 5 hours a day? That's not appropriate whether your kid is 5 or 6. At this point, some screen time is inevitable (usually tablets, not laptops, as kindergarteners are not expected to have computer skills or to know how to use a mouse).

I don't think redshirting solved any real problems for you. Glad your kid feels like a leader I guess.

Seriously. If your kindergartner is on a laptop five hours a day, you need to find a new school. That's appalling.

[Anonymous]

Everyone is very focused on the K experience since it comes first, but a major consideration should be senior year of HS.

The older kids seemed ready to fly the nest and too old to be in HS.

It’s immaterial in elementary school but in high school it’s a bit odd to be turning 19 but still have a curfew and living with mom and dad.

Consider not just elementary school but having a 19 year old in high school!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry but my son (August 30) wasn't ready for K at 5. Maybe if schools were different, he would have been. But he wasn't ready to sit on a laptop 5 hours a day, 30 min recess, he couldn't read yet, still wore a pullup at night. If K had been anything like his high quality, play based Pre-K I would have sent him.

At 6 he was perfectly ready for school. He felt confident and a leader in class. He could read, no pullups. Teachers praised his ability to sit still and control himself all year in K.

FWIW I sent my August dd to school on time. She was ready and school is more designed for girls IMO.

What does wearing a pull-up at night have to do with K readiness? That's at home, and there are kids who wear nighttime pull-ups into middle elementary. It's totally irrelevant. He was potty trained during the day, yes? Then it doesn't matter.

LOTS of kids cannot yet read when kindergarten starts. That's what K is for. Yes, some kids might be reading fluently, either because their parents made it happen or because they took to it easily and didn't need to be taught. Most kids will be at the stage where they can recognize letters and associate it with sounds but are either only just sounding out basic words or still figuring out how to translate their knowledge of letters into reading words. And then some kids will still be learning some letters and sounds and be not quite ready to sound out. If your kid was in any of those categories, they were ready for K. Learning to read is one of the main focuses of K, so it's a great place for a kid who needs to learn.

Finally, what the heck kind of school is putting kindergarteners on a laptop for 5 hours a day? That's not appropriate whether your kid is 5 or 6. At this point, some screen time is inevitable (usually tablets, not laptops, as kindergarteners are not expected to have computer skills or to know how to use a mouse).

I don't think redshirting solved any real problems for you. Glad your kid feels like a leader I guess.

Some parents get it in their head that something is wrong with their child, or he is behind developmentally. Then they make choices along the way to make it even more difficult for the child to fit in and be treated like a normal kid.

My neighbor is convinced her child has social issues and maybe so. Because of it she won’t let her ride the bus with other kids. Simply makes the situation worse imho. I want to tell her that her child is normal and should ride the bus but that wouldn’t go over well.

The PP is so convinced her son is slow that she made him stay home with her an extra year. Poor kid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry but my son (August 30) wasn't ready for K at 5. Maybe if schools were different, he would have been. But he wasn't ready to sit on a laptop 5 hours a day, 30 min recess, he couldn't read yet, still wore a pullup at night. If K had been anything like his high quality, play based Pre-K I would have sent him.

At 6 he was perfectly ready for school. He felt confident and a leader in class. He could read, no pullups. Teachers praised his ability to sit still and control himself all year in K.

FWIW I sent my August dd to school on time. She was ready and school is more designed for girls IMO.

What does wearing a pull-up at night have to do with K readiness? That's at home, and there are kids who wear nighttime pull-ups into middle elementary. It's totally irrelevant. He was potty trained during the day, yes? Then it doesn't matter.

LOTS of kids cannot yet read when kindergarten starts. That's what K is for. Yes, some kids might be reading fluently, either because their parents made it happen or because they took to it easily and didn't need to be taught. Most kids will be at the stage where they can recognize letters and associate it with sounds but are either only just sounding out basic words or still figuring out how to translate their knowledge of letters into reading words. And then some kids will still be learning some letters and sounds and be not quite ready to sound out. If your kid was in any of those categories, they were ready for K. Learning to read is one of the main focuses of K, so it's a great place for a kid who needs to learn.

Finally, what the heck kind of school is putting kindergarteners on a laptop for 5 hours a day? That's not appropriate whether your kid is 5 or 6. At this point, some screen time is inevitable (usually tablets, not laptops, as kindergarteners are not expected to have computer skills or to know how to use a mouse).

I don't think redshirting solved any real problems for you. Glad your kid feels like a leader I guess.

Some parents get it in their head that something is wrong with their child, or he is behind developmentally. Then they make choices along the way to make it even more difficult for the child to fit in and be treated like a normal kid.

My neighbor is convinced her child has social issues and maybe so. Because of it she won’t let her ride the bus with other kids. Simply makes the situation worse imho. I want to tell her that her child is normal and should ride the bus but that wouldn’t go over well.

The PP is so convinced her son is slow that she made him stay home with her an extra year. Poor kid.

The concern trolling is really something.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:If you redshirt your kids, the other kids will figure out what age your child is (most likely your child will simply tell them) and therefore their parents will too. It's less that people are cataloguing the ages and birthdays of every child and more that when you encounter an 8 year old in 1st or a 10 yr old in 3rd, it is notable, and kids and adults alike will share that info.

The fact that people discover this does not make them creepy stalkers. Again, usually this information is learned from the child themselves when they tell other kids what their age is, which is a very normal thing for kids to share with one another.

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.

+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old

Exactly. It's often a point of pride for kids in younger grades to be the oldest, so the redshirted kids get revealed very quickly. This can also be where the resentment starts, if you've got a redshirted kid in the classroom boasting about being the oldest. It's meaningless but it draws attention to it in a negative way.

If you redshirt, talk to your kids about how being a year older or younger isn't important. Make sure they understand that being older doesn't make them better, and find a way to explain why you redshirted that doesn't put other kids down. You don't want your redshirted kid lording it over other children.

TBH it's more likely that they will be uncomfortable and self conscious about being older than everyone else, like they're too old to be in the grade they're in.

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade.

Because it will never happen.

said the person who has literally never met a child

How would the kids know what “too old” was unless psycho mom had a sit down and talked about it? Real kids only care about who’s birthday is next and if they are going to the party.

This is a strange world you live in where the moms know the ages of literally hundreds of children at their kids' schools, but the kids have no idea how old anyone is or what grade you're supposed to be in each grade.

There is no correct age per grade since school year isn’t the calendar year. Kids have birthdays all year round.

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school.

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.

Pfft. If you have a kid who is older than some children in the grade ahead of them, the other kids will sniff that out in about three seconds and the entire grade will know within days. Some will think it's cool. Some won't care. Some will ask what is wrong with you.

The redshirted kid with be a year older than their peers forever. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. College. It will always be an issue, to varying degrees.

You do realize that college students vary wildly in age, right? Kids take a gap year between HS and college. Kids transfer colleges and their credits might not always transfer exactly. They take a year off for health reasons, or they join the military and have to take time off for training or because they actually get deployed. Or they have a kid! Allll kinds of stuff happens. Even throughout K-12 school, different areas have different cutoffs. The places that start school early in early-mid August in the Midwest and the South often have 7/30 cutoffs. The August and September birthday kids (and there are a lot, these are some of the most common birthdays of the year) didn’t meet the cutoff where they started school.

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind.

Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.

I know it's probably hard, if you're a parent redshirting a child, to acknowledge that you're causing a lot more problems for your kid than you're solving (and so unnecessarily!), but don't say no one warned you.

Redshirting has been a thing in affluent areas at least since I was in elementary school in the 90s. Show any data about its “problems” please.

Not in our area. I don’t care either way but people should be honest. I have two kids born in March and June and one kid born in November. The spring birthday kids started preschool at 3 years old, then a second year of preschool (prekindergarten) at 4 years old. There was nothing left for them to learn at that level and they were mature. They would have been so bored repeating pre-k, I can’t imagine. The next step was kindergarten, a step they were more than qualified to take.

If I had a child with any kind of delays or difficulties I would have held them back no problem. But I don’t get how a child who is academically advanced at this young age could survive being stuck repeating a year.