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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]A question about fairness!

How is it fair for red shirted kids to be in a class with my late June birthday kid? Developmentally they are going to be ahead, do the teachers care or take this into consideration?? It doesn't seem fair. Some can be almost 9 months older.[/quote]

Do you read to your child? Pay for supplements? Are you MC and above? Does your child have health insurance? Safe housing? Stable access to food?

If so, how is it fair for kids in your child’s class who don’t have the above to be in class with your child? Or do you not care about those kids?

Grow up. You are so embarrassing and ridiculous. I didn’t redshirt, I just cannot stand DCUMs whiny, narcissistic, and pathetic anti redshirters.  [/quote]

You are always the most vitriolic person on any red shirting thread. I mean, look at your language in this post, which is 10x more dramatic than anything anyone else has posted.

Usually when people object to red shirting, it's the situations in which it's fully discretionary. Like not situations where a child has an identified developmental disadvantage. It's the people who hold back their summer birthdays (usually boys) because they don't want their sons to be on the smaller side in school. There are also people who do it explicitly for advantages in athletics (and in fact that is where the word comes from, as it originally only described "red shirted" college freshman who would be recruited but not played their freshman year in order to give them time to get bigger/stronger/more competitive).

There are obviously fairness concerns with discretionary redshirting and they are never going to go away, no matter how angry and vicious you get on DCUM threads on the subject.[/quote]

NP, and I agree with PP. Anti-redshirt parents always gloss over the other unfair, "discretionary" advantages their children have. Where they live, what school they go to, what they eat, what hobbies they have, what tutors they get, etc., etc. But somehow the terrible line in the sand is redshirting, which, incidentally, may be more accessible to some families than other advantages (i.e., if you already have a stay home parent or a family caregiver it doesn't cost extra to delay school entry for a year).

PP may have been a little harsh, but the whining is ridculous.[/quote]

Some people who oppose redshirting oppose it specifically because they don't have those same discretionary advantages you are talking about.  It really depends on the person.

One reason I oppose redshirting [b]except in the instance of developmental delays [/b] is because my kid is already at a disadvantage versus kids who have a lot of resources, with parents who can afford tutoring and supplementing, kids who don't have ADHD, kids with more family and people in their corner helping them on. My kid doesn't have any of that stuff. But then on top of that, the really well-resourced families are ALSO the ones more likely to redshirt (because they know the system, because they can afford another year of childcare) so then in addition to their kids having more financial resources and family resources, their kids are also going to bigger and older than my kid all the way through school.

If redshirting was something that MC and LC families did to even the playing field, you might have a point. But redshirting (outside of developmental issues) is largely something that already-advantaged families do to increase their advantages.

So yeah: anti-redshirt.[/quote]

Except that at age 3 or 4, when kids are getting ready to start school, many who will later be diagnosed with some sort of developmental disability haven't yet been identified. For example, my kid was born 3 days before the cut off in DC. Although she was later diagnosed with autism, all we knew at age 4, when we were deciding to send her to school was that she was barely potty trained, didn't talk to people outside her family, and still only parallel played. If red shirting had only been available to those with a known disability, she wouldn't have qualified.

Incidentally, because of the difference in cut offs between DC and Maryland, had we lived in Maryland, our decision wouldn't even have been considered red shirting.[/quote]

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