Reply to Who has final say on holding a student back?

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[quote=Anonymous]Hi OP.

We had a similar situation...DC was in K, and in early spring of that year the school asked us to think about repeating the grade due to issues of "immaturity" they noticed in DC. We discussed it, but didn't agree with the school's impressions of our child, but since DC had a mid-summer bday and was a preemie (which equated to having a late summer bday), we had a private evaluation done just to make sure DC was on track.

Aside from slight impulsiveness (which is typical of most 5 year olds), the provider found zero issues and discouraged having DC repeat the grade. Several weeks later we met with the K division leader who assumed we were on board with DC repeating the grade, and was quite surprised when we said we were not. The leader offered several reasons why repeating would be in the best interest of DC, but none of them were academic. They said things like...DC stays on the playground when teacher calls kids to lineup, talks out of turn, at times clings to teacher at recess...all things that we thought were typical of kids DC's age...and they were. The issue was that DC was being compared to kids who were between 3-10 months older, which can make a big difference when the kids are being evaluated as a group. There were kids who turned 6 just weeks after DC turned 5, so it really did look like DC was immature when in fact, that wasn't the case. I believe there were 2-3 other kids in the class who had similar situations...DC and one other kid moved to 1st grade, another kid repeated, but I'm not sure about the other.

I brought the age disparity to the leader's attention and provided the school with the evaluation report that discouraged having DC repeat. I also asked the school to provide us with a written guarantee that whatever issues they felt DC had would be resolved/corrected by having DC repeat Kindergarten, but of course they didn't want to do that. Down the line we did discover that DC had some mild attention issues, but repeating the grade would not have helped that issue, and probably would have made it worse because DC would have been doing work that they had breezed through the year before.

I guess what I'm really trying to say is trust your gut...you know your kid better than anyone else, so do what you think is right for him/her. It usually all works out in the end no matter which road you decide to take :)[/quote]

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