Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Or, send our kid and get them the help they need so they don’t struggle.
What "help" do you recommend?
IEP’s. Soooo many kids have them. Professional help often paid for by the school district. I’ve see kids get services for adhd, dyslexia, occupational therapy… I think many people like you overestimate your ability and underestimate the ability of professionals with undergrad and grad degrees in education and therapy.
IEPs are for children with disabilities. You have to qualify for them. You can't just "get an IEP."
- Professional with an undergrad and grad degree in education and psychology.
Then what is the issue you feel that you can’t send a 5 to Kinder? I’m telling you, you’re making it something it’s not. It’s not that hard. Trust me.
Some kids just need a bit more time. That’s the help. It’s so weird you can’t understand that. Professionals and parents agree. Busy bodies with faux concerns about other people’s children don’t get an opinion.
No, they don’t. They need to be in school with age appropriate peers
Could you please share the data you’re sourcing this from? That age-identical classrooms are critical to children’s success? Moreso than the developmental appropriateness of the environment? Because candidly I think you’re making this up as you go along.
My four year old and her seven year old cousin are best friends. It’s amazing to see how she brings out leadership and compassion in her older cousin and how her cousin brings out courage and creativity in her.
The discussion is about peers and a child held back isn't necessarily going to be a leader just because they are older. It harms everyone and when you get to HS, do you want your 14 year old in classes with 19-20 year olds as that is whats happening.
You’re right, a child who is redshirted isn’t necessarily going to be a leader and— parents who are redshirting aren’t always doing it for that reason anyway. So don’t worry about the redshirted kids.
You seem to be suggesting a freshman in high school could be taking classes with a senior— while the 20 y/o would be shockingly rare, it’s not more worrying to have a 19 than an 18 y/o senior. What is your panic about here?
It’s it rare at all. Electives, gym, health ed and math are always mixed. My 13-14 year old freshman had three classes with seniors freshman year. An elective that was auditioned in, pe and math.
Ok so please explain your anxiety around a 14 year old being in a class with a 19 year old that doesn’t exist for an 18 year old?
.
19 year olds in high school isn’t redshirting. Those are kids who failed a year, had transfer issues, are foreign students who need more time for the language, were homeschooled or have GED and need the credit etc etc. It happens rarely, but that won’t be solved by banning redshirting. Some areas have specific adult only high schools for ages 18 plus - maybe advocate for that if it’s an issue in your area.
These kids were held back. Except the fall kids who missed the deadline. Let’s call it what it is. It’s a huge issue when these adults are with young teens.
Nonsense. I’m around a ton of teens. This is 100% a non-issue.
The hyperbole from the anti-redshirt posters is so ridiculous. It’s like none of you have contact with any actual teens.
The redshirted kids at my child's middle school who all started puberty a grade earlier than they would have had they started on time absolutely changed the culture if the school and the experience for the non-redshirted kids, for the worse.
I cannot fathom why anyone who has seen a kid through puberty would be like "oh yeah, it would be great to have an age spread of 18 months in 6th and 7th grade. Super cool." It's already a hard time and it's already harder for the kids who start puberty early or late, but now you want to stretch it out even more? Whyyyyyyyyy? It makes no sense.
I am fine if K is for 6/7 year olds. Just make it official and start school later. But this unofficial system where K is for 4-7 yr olds, and people are supposed to case the joint in advance to guess where in that age spread to send their kid? That's dumb. Just pick an age and have everyone send their kid when they hit that age.
Typical onset of puberty for girls is between 8 and 13 years old. For boys, it’s between 9-14 years old. That’s already a 5-year spread within the realm of completely normal.
You need to calm down.
1) Onset is not not equally distributed along those ranges.
2) Redshirting of non-summer birthdays makes the range even wider, which is a substantial issue. It forces families of on time kids to deal with puberty issues a year earlier than even the earliest year they would otherwise deal with it.
3) I feel very calm, thank you -- my kids are through this. Parents choosing to redshirt have not. They are making a choice based on a perceived disadvantage in kindergarten, not understanding the negative impact 4-6 years later. Both for their kid and dir peers.
There is absolutely no evidence for the bolded statement. You don’t understand statistics.
You don't need evidence for basic math.
Redshirting expands the range if ages in one grade. You can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or a neutral thing. But you can't argue it's not a thing.
Without redshirting, the typical 6th grade class would have 11 year olds turning 12, either during the school year or in the summer following. With redshirting, it will have a mix of 11 and 12 year olds at the beginning of the year, and a mix of 12 and 13 year olds at the end PLUS some non-redshirted summer birthdays who are still 11.
Again, you can argue that's not a big deal or that it only amounts to a few extra minutes months, but mathematically, redshirting expands the age range for the grade. Which means, yes, it expands the range of puberty onset.
These are just facts.
That applies equally to the Summer birthdays you’re good with redshirting.
I'm not advocating for any policy or another.
Yes, redshirting summer birthdays expands the age range of a grade. But by less. If redshirting is restricted to summer birthdays, you still get a cohort of kids who are 11/12 in 6th. But some kids will start the year at 12+, instead of starting at 11 and turning 12 during the year. So an expansion, yes, though a more minor one. And say only late summer birthdays are redshirted-- this might expand the range by only a week or two.
That is different than a situation where some parents are redshirting kids with spring birthdays, which will expand the range by 4-6 months.
Two weeks is a fraction of 6 months, so it is not unreasonable for a person to argue that redshirting of kids with birthdays close to the cut off should be allowed, but not kids with birthdays far from the cut off.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Or, send our kid and get them the help they need so they don’t struggle.
What "help" do you recommend?
IEP’s. Soooo many kids have them. Professional help often paid for by the school district. I’ve see kids get services for adhd, dyslexia, occupational therapy… I think many people like you overestimate your ability and underestimate the ability of professionals with undergrad and grad degrees in education and therapy.
IEPs are for children with disabilities. You have to qualify for them. You can't just "get an IEP."
- Professional with an undergrad and grad degree in education and psychology.
Then what is the issue you feel that you can’t send a 5 to Kinder? I’m telling you, you’re making it something it’s not. It’s not that hard. Trust me.
Some kids just need a bit more time. That’s the help. It’s so weird you can’t understand that. Professionals and parents agree. Busy bodies with faux concerns about other people’s children don’t get an opinion.
No, they don’t. They need to be in school with age appropriate peers
Could you please share the data you’re sourcing this from? That age-identical classrooms are critical to children’s success? Moreso than the developmental appropriateness of the environment? Because candidly I think you’re making this up as you go along.
My four year old and her seven year old cousin are best friends. It’s amazing to see how she brings out leadership and compassion in her older cousin and how her cousin brings out courage and creativity in her.
The discussion is about peers and a child held back isn't necessarily going to be a leader just because they are older. It harms everyone and when you get to HS, do you want your 14 year old in classes with 19-20 year olds as that is whats happening.
You’re right, a child who is redshirted isn’t necessarily going to be a leader and— parents who are redshirting aren’t always doing it for that reason anyway. So don’t worry about the redshirted kids.
You seem to be suggesting a freshman in high school could be taking classes with a senior— while the 20 y/o would be shockingly rare, it’s not more worrying to have a 19 than an 18 y/o senior. What is your panic about here?
It’s it rare at all. Electives, gym, health ed and math are always mixed. My 13-14 year old freshman had three classes with seniors freshman year. An elective that was auditioned in, pe and math.
Ok so please explain your anxiety around a 14 year old being in a class with a 19 year old that doesn’t exist for an 18 year old?
.
19 year olds in high school isn’t redshirting. Those are kids who failed a year, had transfer issues, are foreign students who need more time for the language, were homeschooled or have GED and need the credit etc etc. It happens rarely, but that won’t be solved by banning redshirting. Some areas have specific adult only high schools for ages 18 plus - maybe advocate for that if it’s an issue in your area.
These kids were held back. Except the fall kids who missed the deadline. Let’s call it what it is. It’s a huge issue when these adults are with young teens.
Nonsense. I’m around a ton of teens. This is 100% a non-issue.
The hyperbole from the anti-redshirt posters is so ridiculous. It’s like none of you have contact with any actual teens.
The redshirted kids at my child's middle school who all started puberty a grade earlier than they would have had they started on time absolutely changed the culture if the school and the experience for the non-redshirted kids, for the worse.
I cannot fathom why anyone who has seen a kid through puberty would be like "oh yeah, it would be great to have an age spread of 18 months in 6th and 7th grade. Super cool." It's already a hard time and it's already harder for the kids who start puberty early or late, but now you want to stretch it out even more? Whyyyyyyyyy? It makes no sense.
I am fine if K is for 6/7 year olds. Just make it official and start school later. But this unofficial system where K is for 4-7 yr olds, and people are supposed to case the joint in advance to guess where in that age spread to send their kid? That's dumb. Just pick an age and have everyone send their kid when they hit that age.
Typical onset of puberty for girls is between 8 and 13 years old. For boys, it’s between 9-14 years old. That’s already a 5-year spread within the realm of completely normal.
You need to calm down.
1) Onset is not not equally distributed along those ranges.
2) Redshirting of non-summer birthdays makes the range even wider, which is a substantial issue. It forces families of on time kids to deal with puberty issues a year earlier than even the earliest year they would otherwise deal with it.
3) I feel very calm, thank you -- my kids are through this. Parents choosing to redshirt have not. They are making a choice based on a perceived disadvantage in kindergarten, not understanding the negative impact 4-6 years later. Both for their kid and dir peers.
There is absolutely no evidence for the bolded statement. You don’t understand statistics.
You don't need evidence for basic math.
Redshirting expands the range if ages in one grade. You can argue whether that's a good thing or a bad thing or a neutral thing. But you can't argue it's not a thing.
Without redshirting, the typical 6th grade class would have 11 year olds turning 12, either during the school year or in the summer following. With redshirting, it will have a mix of 11 and 12 year olds at the beginning of the year, and a mix of 12 and 13 year olds at the end PLUS some non-redshirted summer birthdays who are still 11.
Again, you can argue that's not a big deal or that it only amounts to a few extra minutes months, but mathematically, redshirting expands the age range for the grade. Which means, yes, it expands the range of puberty onset.
These are just facts.
That applies equally to the Summer birthdays you’re good with redshirting.
I'm not advocating for any policy or another.
Yes, redshirting summer birthdays expands the age range of a grade. But by less. If redshirting is restricted to summer birthdays, you still get a cohort of kids who are 11/12 in 6th. But some kids will start the year at 12+, instead of starting at 11 and turning 12 during the year. So an expansion, yes, though a more minor one. And say only late summer birthdays are redshirted-- this might expand the range by only a week or two.
That is different than a situation where some parents are redshirting kids with spring birthdays, which will expand the range by 4-6 months.
Two weeks is a fraction of 6 months, so it is not unreasonable for a person to argue that redshirting of kids with birthdays close to the cut off should be allowed, but not kids with birthdays far from the cut off.
Except you know more children are born in August/July/September so the impact isn’t proportionally much smaller.
The thing that makes it unreasonable to argue that redshirting of a September birthday is fine and an October birthday isn’t is that the rules say both are equally permitted and no one on DCUM makes the rules. No schools are trying to limit the practice (private schools outright encourage it) and no lawmaker is going to support giving a right to a September parent that an October parent is denied. So all the anti-redshirt hysteria is just screaming into the internet void that other parents are exercising their prerogatives in a way that OP and her comrades didn’t.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Some people are arguing for changing the rules to prevent redshirting, particularly of children with birthdays well before the cut off. That isn't "dramatic hysteria." It's an opinion that differs from yours.
And yes, I see that you frame this as a question simply if different patents making different choices. I understand and respect that argument -- like I said, I can see it from both sides.
However, I also understand that other parents do not feel they have the same choices. A parent may lack the financial means to redshirt, for instance. They may also have a child form whom it is really not clear if redshirting makes sense -- should you redshirt a newly 5 yr old child who has some emotional immaturity but is reading chapter books and craves an academic environment? Should you redshirt a newly 5 year old who is very shy and already also bigger and taller than all his peers? A parent if a child like this might prefer to have the choice taken away from them by a more hard and fast rule.
Again, I see it from both sides. If you cannot, I suggest you try harder.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Some people are arguing for changing the rules to prevent redshirting, particularly of children with birthdays well before the cut off. That isn't "dramatic hysteria." It's an opinion that differs from yours.
And yes, I see that you frame this as a question simply if different patents making different choices. I understand and respect that argument -- like I said, I can see it from both sides.
However, I also understand that other parents do not feel they have the same choices. A parent may lack the financial means to redshirt, for instance. They may also have a child form whom it is really not clear if redshirting makes sense -- should you redshirt a newly 5 yr old child who has some emotional immaturity but is reading chapter books and craves an academic environment? Should you redshirt a newly 5 year old who is very shy and already also bigger and taller than all his peers? A parent if a child like this might prefer to have the choice taken away from them by a more hard and fast rule.
Again, I see it from both sides. If you cannot, I suggest you try harder.
Please quote parents making policy arguments about changing the regulations— which school board meetings they're attending, which private school administration they’re lobbying, which lawmakers they’re calling.
It’s not here.
What this is is a thread where OP blames redshirted kids for her son not getting into GT, says it’s annoying that half the boys in her private school redshirt (so please don’t get into a resources argument, she’s already in private school) and that her son is being held to too high a standard because the other kids are older.
When challenged she called the redshirted kids social outcasts and said they don’t thrive.
It was suggested parents be forced to put their kids on IEPs.
Then the tact was the faux 20 year old high school senior, than the 19 year olds that no one could explain why were so much worse than 18.
Now we’ve made it to puberty.
And. Not. Once has any harm been shown, or anyone even suggested parents were acting outside the regulation.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
You are the one in hysterics
You're just out of gas at this point with nothing left to argue.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Some people are arguing for changing the rules to prevent redshirting, particularly of children with birthdays well before the cut off. That isn't "dramatic hysteria." It's an opinion that differs from yours.
And yes, I see that you frame this as a question simply if different patents making different choices. I understand and respect that argument -- like I said, I can see it from both sides.
However, I also understand that other parents do not feel they have the same choices. A parent may lack the financial means to redshirt, for instance. They may also have a child form whom it is really not clear if redshirting makes sense -- should you redshirt a newly 5 yr old child who has some emotional immaturity but is reading chapter books and craves an academic environment? Should you redshirt a newly 5 year old who is very shy and already also bigger and taller than all his peers? A parent if a child like this might prefer to have the choice taken away from them by a more hard and fast rule.
Again, I see it from both sides. If you cannot, I suggest you try harder.
Please quote parents making policy arguments about changing the regulations— which school board meetings they're attending, which private school administration they’re lobbying, which lawmakers they’re calling.
It’s not here.
What this is is a thread where OP blames redshirted kids for her son not getting into GT, says it’s annoying that half the boys in her private school redshirt (so please don’t get into a resources argument, she’s already in private school) and that her son is being held to too high a standard because the other kids are older.
When challenged she called the redshirted kids social outcasts and said they don’t thrive.
It was suggested parents be forced to put their kids on IEPs.
Then the tact was the faux 20 year old high school senior, than the 19 year olds that no one could explain why were so much worse than 18.
Now we’ve made it to puberty.
And. Not. Once has any harm been shown, or anyone even suggested parents were acting outside the regulation.
So yes. This is truly just hysteria.
I am the OP and we do not even have a gifted program. Do not make things up. I don't care if my kid is in a gifted program.
The two kids in question are social outcasts in their peer group. That is not untrue. They are not included by their peers. As parents, we do include them but at this age kids start to self select their friend groups. This is an anonymous message board. That statement shouldn't offend you. I think the line has gone too far with redshirting. That is my opinion. You have your opinion. You are the one in hysterics.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
You are the one in hysterics
You're just out of gas at this point with nothing left to argue.
I think you just don't even understand how crazy you sound.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
You are the one in hysterics
You're just out of gas at this point with nothing left to argue.
I think you just don't even understand how crazy you sound.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
You are the one in hysterics
You're just out of gas at this point with nothing left to argue.
You do understand how a message board works right? Dozens of people are responding to you, that is not all the OP. I'm the OP and my response is maybe one every 50 comments.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Some people are arguing for changing the rules to prevent redshirting, particularly of children with birthdays well before the cut off. That isn't "dramatic hysteria." It's an opinion that differs from yours.
And yes, I see that you frame this as a question simply if different patents making different choices. I understand and respect that argument -- like I said, I can see it from both sides.
However, I also understand that other parents do not feel they have the same choices. A parent may lack the financial means to redshirt, for instance. They may also have a child form whom it is really not clear if redshirting makes sense -- should you redshirt a newly 5 yr old child who has some emotional immaturity but is reading chapter books and craves an academic environment? Should you redshirt a newly 5 year old who is very shy and already also bigger and taller than all his peers? A parent if a child like this might prefer to have the choice taken away from them by a more hard and fast rule.
Again, I see it from both sides. If you cannot, I suggest you try harder.
Please quote parents making policy arguments about changing the regulations— which school board meetings they're attending, which private school administration they’re lobbying, which lawmakers they’re calling.
It’s not here.
What this is is a thread where OP blames redshirted kids for her son not getting into GT, says it’s annoying that half the boys in her private school redshirt (so please don’t get into a resources argument, she’s already in private school) and that her son is being held to too high a standard because the other kids are older.
When challenged she called the redshirted kids social outcasts and said they don’t thrive.
It was suggested parents be forced to put their kids on IEPs.
Then the tact was the faux 20 year old high school senior, than the 19 year olds that no one could explain why were so much worse than 18.
Now we’ve made it to puberty.
And. Not. Once has any harm been shown, or anyone even suggested parents were acting outside the regulation.
So yes. This is truly just hysteria.
I'm not going to go collect all the comments but yes, many posters have made policy arguments on this thread. That schools should limit redshirting to summer birthdays and/or children with demonstrated delays for instance. Other posters have argued for struct cut offs. Still others have focused on the K curriculum/classroom experience, arguing that making K more academic leads to more redshirting do if we kept K less rigid and academic, more parents would choose to send their 5 year olds.
It is not hysteria.
Also, I will note that there are absolutely schools and school districts that seek to crack down on redshirting. In fact DC public schools do not technically permit it and you have to game the system a bit to do it in DCPS. Some specific schools within DCPS are more militant than others about preventing it.
Perhaps one reason there are often many people on these threads arguing against redshirting is that this website is based on a school district that strongly opposed it as a practice. It is interesting how often I see posters talking about redshirting policies on this site with the assumption all districts treat it the same when there is a wide variety of approaches even just in the DC area.
Perhaps you perceive it as hysteria because you are not well educated on how a broad range of people view this issue and assume your experience in your district is universal when it is just a single data point.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
You are the one in hysterics
You're just out of gas at this point with nothing left to argue.
You do understand how a message board works right? Dozens of people are responding to you, that is not all the OP. I'm the OP and my response is maybe one every 50 comments.
You don't understand that multiple people are responding to YOU.
Anonymous wrote:Public schools aren’t retaining anyone because that costs $$$. I’ve only heard of retention being offered when a kid missed a lot of a grade due to something like a serious medical issue, or at the end of the Covid school years - 2019-20 or 2020-21 - if a kid didn’t progress during the closures. My neighbor had a young for grade 1st grader in 20-21 and FCPS did offer to let her repeat 1st in person.
But let this thread be a heads up to everyone: redshirting is common, perhaps even expected, in private schools, especially for the younger for grade kids. So plan accordingly.
+1, and I would say it’s increasingly common in public school among parents who read the data on developmentally appropriate settings for 4-5. So, assume if you send a four year old they’ll be youngest by a year+, and an early five year old by a year. None of this is secret, or unavailable information to you.
Since most public schools do an age cut off around September 1st, the number of kids attending K at age 4 is very small (and even people who complain about excessive redshirting don't complain about redshirting a kid who would be 4 during the "normal" cut off). In NY (which is the only place with a midyear cut off that results in a lot of 4 year olds being eligible for K) it's common for people to redshirt those kids and no one complains about it.
The only redshirting people complain about is when people start redshirting kids who would be well over 5 when starting K but they hold them back anyway. Yes, in some privates that's common place, but the school generally encourages it and everyone has a chance to do it -- they like having an older class of K students and often they will strongly encourage redshirting summer or late spring birthdays. Some schools even offer a transitional year for young K students before taking the regular K class, so you still wind up with a fairly age-homogenous class.
But in public that's not the case, and when some parents start deciding their April or May birthday kid needs another year, it can leave other parents stuck with the consequences of those actions without warning. No one is going to get mad that a parent redshirted so their kid could start K at 5, but when you see kids starting K at 6 and a half, it becomes an issue.
Please yell at me now and tell me I'm a "crazy anti-redshirter" for agreeing this specific issue is a problem.
As someone with a young for grade kid, I think it is absolutely insane to consider this a problem whatsoever, and really makes you sound like someone who has no experience with any real problems in life.
My kid with an August birthday who I sent on time (she started K at 5 but was among the youngest in her grade) was viciously bullied by a redshirted child in 1st grade. My kid was 6 years old for the entirety of 1st grade. The bullying child turned 8 in September and was signficantly bigger and taller. Redshirting played a major role in the bullying because while this one child was the leader, there were many older kids in the classroom due to redshirting and when the bully would attack/provoke my kid, she'd cry, and then all the older kids would round on her and call her a baby and tease her for being small and young (she is average height for her age).
I had no idea how prevalent redshirting was when I enrolled my kid in K. She was academically and socially ready for a K classroom full of 5 and 6 year old children. In fact she continues to be at the top of her grade academically and she is well liked by teachers for being a good listener who follows directions and is helpful and kind in the classroom (something that apparently the extra years of preschool or staying home did not help instill in these redshirted kids who are merely bigger and older, not more mature).
I absolutely resent that my child's classroom environment has been dominated by older children who I think should have spent their 5/6 year in K learning out to function in elementary school, but instead spent it elsewhere and arrived at elementary school with their own ideas about how school should work. I resent how common bullying and relational aggression are at the school because of these older-but-less-mature kids.
Call me a crazy anti-redshirted if you want. I think redshirting sucks. Kids should start school at the same age so that they learn the same skills and are generally at the same developmental level. Kids with developmental delays can/should be held back to accommodate their delays, but it shouldn't be at the parents' discretion.
We will be moving school districts before these older kids hit puberty in 3rd grade and we have to deal with that.
As a parent who doesn't care about redshirting one way or another (and has both middle-of-age-for grade and young-for-grade kids, none old-for-grade): the bullying isn't because your kid is small. Bullies will find literally anything to gang up on kids about. One of my kids was bulled for not watching Spongebob Squarepants in a late elementary grade. Does that make sense as a thing to mock a kid over? No. But my kid was a prickly and kind of hard-to-get-to-know kid, so of course they were a target. The actual thing to make fun of was incidental to the act of piling on.
And it's possible (probable?) this older kid is lashing out because:
- they do have delays and you have no idea and the delays are social
- they feel embarassed about your kid doing as well when they are so much older.
PP here. Of course bullying can happen for a whole variety of reasons.
But at my kid's specific school, in specific classrooms where there are a large percent of redshirted kids including one that was significantly older, the bullying was closely related to having a cohort of older, bigger, unsocialized kids. My DD was not the only child targeted, but all the children who were bullied were "on time" kids who were on the younger end of normal for the grade. All the bullies were the oldest kids in class.
Also, it's not just about the age difference. It's also that these redshirted kids were not socialized into elementary school when they were young enough for it help. They arrived at K too old and less malleable. In my child's 1st grade class, those older kids RAN the classroom. This year my kid is in 2nd and due to the bullying issues last year, my kid and others who were targeted are in a classroom without any of the much older kids. The classroom is significantly better, with less conflict and fewer behavioral issues.
I don't have any issue with moderate redshirting for kids with summer birthdays. I don't think you should be allowed to redshirt a kid with a birthday during the school year unless there is a clear reason why delaying kindergarten will help. And I actually think a lot of developmental delays might be made worse by redshirting unless you can show the kids are going to get services to improve the situation. Perhaps some of these delays would be best addressed by having the kid in a classroom with other kids and receiving services through the school.
I honestly do not understand why you continue to keep your child in a school where your DC experiences significant bullying and you believe the classroom activities and level are so wildly inappropriate. It seems weird to me.
You seem very ignorant of the reality that most parents experience. Most parents can’t just switch schools out of the blue.
Right. Which leads parents to make careful decisions about when their kids start school. For example— not sending a kid who may struggle to kindergarten too early.
Unless they don’t know about how prevalent it is because the schools don’t say anything and the other moms apparently don’t volunteer the info. Nice.
What information do you feel is lacking? If you ask your local elementary school they will likely tell you the average kindergarten age. You presumably know your child’s age. Do some research into peer reviewed studies about optimal environments for the child’s age you have and see whether your local or chosen kindergarten matches with that. I’m truly confused what you think someone needs to tell you to make this choice?
We arrived back in the US after mostly raising kids on military bases abroad and we arrived in August. Honestly I didn’t even know red shirting was a thing until I saw some really big kindergarten kids on my son’s first day of school. So no I did t put my five year old on a waitlist for preschool, had never heard of “junior kindergarten” at preschool, etc.
That’s really not an excuse for not researching, talking to others, asking around.
Sweetheart, those are all excuses for "I want my child to have an advantage over yours" and we all know it.
I’m a DP, and leaving aside your tone, it’s not an advantage over your student. Your student has exactly the same right to delay a year as anyone else. Nothing is being taken away from you or your child you just made a different choice. Lose your victim mentality around this.
That PP is just mad they didn't know what they were doing.
I really hate the "savvy parents know to redshirt, it's your fault if you don't" argument, because we're talking about kids.
Of course there are going to be parents who, fir whatever reason, don't know the *unspoken* customs if redshirting in a district, and their kid will wind up at a disadvantage. You can criticize the parents for this but it's the kid who suffers.
Which is why there should be NO UNSPOKEN REDSHIRTING CUSTOMS. This should not be gameable. And relishing the idea that some kids struggle in school because their parents naively thought the published age cutoffs were when you are actually supposed to send your kids, and not just a vague suggestion and all the "smart" parents postpone K a year, is a weird flex.
Have a cut off. Enforce a cut off. Make sure the school work makes sense for kids who meet the cut off. This isn't hard. These are kids. We should all want them ALL to succeed.
Apparently it is hard. The current cutoff sends 4 year olds into the classroom for hours sitting on end, doing age inappropriate activities, with barely any time outdoors. Everyone (even on this thread) agrees that isn’t right for a four year old, and yet that’s The Cutoff. So, apparently, it’s hard.
To your other point, the same published guidelines that you assume everyone does have access to also (at least in FCPS) explains what to do if you don’t want to start your kid. I don’t think this is about whisper networks and secret handshakes. What I think is “savvy” is the parents who have a data-informed sense for what their kids should be doing at 4-5-6 and yes, we should really help parents understand how bad sitting still indoors, doing screen-based learning and endless worksheets really is for early childhood.
So you make the cut off 5. Easy. Everyone agrees 4 is too young for K. So kids should enroll in K in the fall after their 5th birthday. Done.
Or, if you think 5 is too young, then make it 6.
If you don't think kids should be sitting indoors for hours on end, then advocate for that not to be how K works. Is it okay in 1st? No. So sounds like we need to talk to schools about crap curriculums that aren't appropriate for any early elementary kids.
Also your argument that we should just make sure that every parent is "data informed" before making the choice to redshirt ignores reality, which is that some parents are simply never going to get there. Some parents lack the cognitive ability or the language skills or the maturity to do that. Some parents are immigrants who don't speak the language. Some parents just went through a divorce or a death in the family and don't have the bandwidth. Some parents are poor and no matter what the data says, they are going to send their kid to K when the school says they can because they can't afford another year of daycare.
Your way means that the kids of all those parents are just SOL. Nice.
The thing is, “I” can’t make it five. Or six.
I can’t make them let kids under six spend at least half of every day outside.
The only thing I can do is keep my kids in environments that align with their age as best as possible within the published regulations, and vote for people who support later starts in kindergarten and more developmentally appropriate.
Yes. “My way” only helps my kid in the immediate case. But I don’t think there are any benefits to pretending I don’t know what the data says about where my four year old belongs.
why not just homeschool a few years until you feel they are ready then put them in the grade they are supposed to be in? this seems like the best solution. the early years is really not a lot of academics to catch up on.
"They grade they are supposed to be in" is an arbitrary rule you made up in your little head. This just isn't how it works. There are actual rules and you just can't handle that people play by them for some reason. What is your deal?
If you really believed that it's totally arbitrary, then you could have a 12 year old and a 3 yr old in the same classroom. Obviously it's not totally arbitrary.
I can see both sides of this argument because it's ultimately about deciding where to draw the lines and naturally different people want to draw them different places. No one is "wrong" -- it's a question of balancing interests.
I find the vitriol on the thread completely unreasonable. Some of you are vicious and I don't understand why.
The lines are already drawn. This thread is actually about being mad that some parents made different choices than others even though everyone has the same opportunity to make a choice. That’s what’s “wrong”’in this thread— wanting to control decisions of other parents that are made within the rules. If someone has evidence people are falisfying their kids birthdates there’s a real complaint here, instead it’s just screaming that some parents made a different (fully within the rules) choice and increasing levels of dramatic hysteria trying to say that choice hurts other kids.
Some people are arguing for changing the rules to prevent redshirting, particularly of children with birthdays well before the cut off. That isn't "dramatic hysteria." It's an opinion that differs from yours.
And yes, I see that you frame this as a question simply if different patents making different choices. I understand and respect that argument -- like I said, I can see it from both sides.
However, I also understand that other parents do not feel they have the same choices. A parent may lack the financial means to redshirt, for instance. They may also have a child form whom it is really not clear if redshirting makes sense -- should you redshirt a newly 5 yr old child who has some emotional immaturity but is reading chapter books and craves an academic environment? Should you redshirt a newly 5 year old who is very shy and already also bigger and taller than all his peers? A parent if a child like this might prefer to have the choice taken away from them by a more hard and fast rule.
Again, I see it from both sides. If you cannot, I suggest you try harder.
Please quote parents making policy arguments about changing the regulations— which school board meetings they're attending, which private school administration they’re lobbying, which lawmakers they’re calling.
It’s not here.
What this is is a thread where OP blames redshirted kids for her son not getting into GT, says it’s annoying that half the boys in her private school redshirt (so please don’t get into a resources argument, she’s already in private school) and that her son is being held to too high a standard because the other kids are older.
When challenged she called the redshirted kids social outcasts and said they don’t thrive.
It was suggested parents be forced to put their kids on IEPs.
Then the tact was the faux 20 year old high school senior, than the 19 year olds that no one could explain why were so much worse than 18.
Now we’ve made it to puberty.
And. Not. Once has any harm been shown, or anyone even suggested parents were acting outside the regulation.
So yes. This is truly just hysteria.
I am the OP and we do not even have a gifted program. Do not make things up. I don't care if my kid is in a gifted program.
The two kids in question are social outcasts in their peer group. That is not untrue. They are not included by their peers. As parents, we do include them but at this age kids start to self select their friend groups. This is an anonymous message board. That statement shouldn't offend you. I think the line has gone too far with redshirting. That is my opinion. You have your opinion. You are the one in hysterics.
Don't tell lies. You called it the "advanced" program and said kids don't belong in gifted or advanced if they are older. They are interchangeable to you.
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