Reply to Why don’t schools have stronger policies about redshirting?

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

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

You can't control other people finding out and you can't control how they will feel about it when they do. Proceed accordingly.[/quote]
+1, most talk about it and are proud to be old [/quote]

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

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

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

Let us know how it goes when the other children make fun of your kid for being too old to be in his or her grade. [/quote]
Because it will never happen. [/quote]

said the person who has literally never met a child[/quote]

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

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

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

Have fun explaining that to all the kids at school. [/quote]

Do you have any kids in school? It’s a non issue.[/quote]

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

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

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

Ok, Spock, but were you never a child? It's easy to say "'don't sweat it" when you're a middle aged parent with the benefit of experience and hindsight and you don't actually have to do it. Not sweating it though is an altogether different matter when you're young and in the thick of it. If you can't see why a child would be self conscious about being older than all of their peers, then I don't know what to tell you other than you're just being willfully blind. [/quote]
Hey Ashley, this is a you problem and nothing else.[/quote]

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

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

DP but the biggest problem with redshirting is reflected in the continuing debate and controversy over it.

If redshirting were really just about helping a few kids who are on the bubble gain a bit more maturity, I don't think it would be a big issue. It becomes debated because of what people are talking about on the thread now -- this idea that being the youngest, in itself, is a major disadvantage. If this is the reason for redshirting, it's just a snake eating its own tail. For every kid that is redshirted, it creates another kid who needs to be redshirted to avoid being the youngest. We can't redshirt all the kids.

Someone HAS to be the youngest. If that's your reason for redshirting, then it should be banned because there's no way to implement it fairly and it just creates controversy and resentment.

However, if redshirting exists because some kids have social delays or need extra time in PK, then redshirting is fine, since that's not really about age so much as it's about maturity, which can vary by age. But to implement this kind of redshirting, we should probably have some kind of assessment done by the school. Because there are enough people who are just genuinely afraid of their kids being the youngest that they will simply claim their child has maturity issues to avoid it. [/quote]

This is a tautology. Redshirting has benefits, other parents resent those benefits, therefore redshirting is the problem because other parents resent it?

By all means if something that’s been happening for decades causes problems *for kids* feel free to share. Otherwise it’s just loud sour grapes because it’s something that was equally available to all of the students and only some parents availed themselves of. [/quote]

If you redshirt a child to keep him from being the youngest, you will solve that problem for one child and create that problem for another child.

So then that child's parents will redshirt, to keep him from being the youngest. Thus creating that problem for another child.

So the third child's parents will redshirt him, to keep him from being the youngest. Thus creating that problem for another child.

When you have February and March birthdays being redshirted, you have to ask yourself if this makes sense, and where does it end? And is there another way to solve this problem if being the youngest.[/quote]

Does your state not have laws about compulsory school attendance? That’s where it ends. It’s not the wild west where anything goes.[/quote]

This. All districts have rules. Within those rules, parents make the decisions that make the most sense for their child. Not making those decisions because other parents (and again, only DCUM parents) resent them is foolish. [/quote]

OP's whole point is that she's in a jurisdiction where the rules are not clear and don't appear to have firm limits, and she's suggesting a clearer policy where summer birthdays may be redshirted but not beyond that. Which I agree with. Redshirting February and March birthdays is absurd and will just result in December and January birthdays wanting to do it. They will have to draw the lines somewhere and I would suggest doing it in June or July depending on when school ends, or pursuing a different solution like transitional K for younger kids or mixed age classrooms in elementary.

Despite what some on this board thing, I'm not anti-redshirting, I just know that some minority of parents will always try to push the limits of whatever rule is in place. There are always people who just don't think the rules apply to them. Instead of indulging those parents by making exceptions for them, districts should have stricter enforcement of cutoffs and clearly communicate them to parents.[/quote]

The rules were clear, even OP acknowledges she was absolutely allowed to redshirt her kid.

What she wasn’t given was information about *other children* to make her decision about her own child, and now she’s mad other parents (with the same information she had…) made different choices.

[/quote]
If only I were the only one with a choice, this would be sooooo much better! [/quote]

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