Reply to Why don’t schools make you just through some hoops for redshirting?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The idea that you should need a doctors note to not send a four year old to all day kindergarten absolutely defies description.

When I was a child kindergarten was a half day for the first six months and I went home and ate lunch and napped. At five.

A good pediatrician would laugh you out of their office if you said that needed a “diagnosis” at four much less a neuropsychiatric work up. Are you even listening to yourself above the shrieking?[/quote]

Except literally no one is suggesting sending a 4 year old to all day kindergarten. This thread states up front that redshirting kids with birthdays close to the cutoff (which is how you wind up with 4 year olds who are technically eligible for kindergarten, because they have August or September birthdays and will turn 5 in the first month of school) should obviously be allowed to redshirt due to age.

This thread is exclusively about late redshirters -- kids with winter or spring birthdays, who are well over the age of 5 by the time K starts. And the suggestion is that for kids in this range (some of whom may indeed benefit from redshirting) there should be some kind of document reason for redshirting since it will result in some kids turning 7 during K (the scenario OP describes) and that could have a negative impact on other kids in class.

Not a single person in this thread has suggested that parents should have to explain why they don't want to start their 4 yr old in K. Not one. We are talking about parents who want to redshirt their 5.5 year old and have them start K at 6.5 instead.[/quote]

If this is such a problem, why haven't the schools taken any steps to address it? Why do they need competitive parents to point out this glaring issue?[/quote]

There are plenty of school districts that have addressed this problem. Lots of schools simply do not allow you to redshirt a 5.5 year old absent documented evidence of a delay. DCPS is one.

The problem is that you do in fact need to have some kind of cut off, and any cut off will produce "youngest kids" in the grade. So yes, this is a problem in many districts that allow redshirting. It can be fine as long as everyone plays along and people mostly just redshirt summer birthdays. But then you get these parents of kids with May/June birthdays who are mad about the summer birthdays redshirting (because it makes their kid "the youngest" if enough people do it). So then more people with May/June kids redshirt, and then you get the same problem with March/April kids.

OP is obviously in a district where the "redshirting creep" has happened and now you've got multiple parents in a grade redshirting January or February birthdays. Which is crazy! But sometimes parents are crazy. That's why you end up having rules, and if parents are crazy enough, the rules will be way more restrictive than they should be (someone with a kid born close to the cut off SHOULD be able to redshirt if they feel it would be best for their kid) because otherwise people will abuse it.

It sucks.[/quote]

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