My wife and I are both teachers. Our daughter who is 5 has been going to Montessori for 2 years. Her teacher had suggested that we might want to have her tested, so we contacted a psychologist who recommended we wait until she turned 6 to get a more reliable score. Little girl stated she wanted to go back to Montessori for Kindergarten so we felt ok, we'll wait. Over the summer she made friends in our neighborhood who are going to the local Elementary.
She changed her mind two weeks before school started and said she wants to go to public school in the first grade. Ok we thought, she can read on a late first/early second level; she adds and subtracts, has great imagination and a cute sense of humor. She should be able to charm her way into first grade easily we thought, give a couple of calls, use inside connections/"professional courtesy", and we'll have a done deal in a couple of days, right?
Wrong.
We had to register her for kindergarten, even though we said we had no interest in putting her into kindergarten, then an S-Team had to be called. We said we didn't want to have an IEP. My wife teaches SpEd at the high school level, so she doesn't want another IEP to deal with, I'm at a middle school and don't want her getting to that level being labeled as different. We tell them we don't want her certified, we just want to skip kindergarten, we show them the policies and quotes from 'A Nation Deceived'. Still the answer is no, we need the s-team to do this. We schedule the S-Team meeting for two working days before school starts. We are told not to bring her as there won't be any testing being done. She and I stay up late doing some bonding watching her favorite shows on discovery health, (she likes Mystery Diagnosis ). I got a call at my school 3 hours before the meeting asking us to bring her. Yep, they decided to test her. She felt she did awful on the WJ3 but the scores we got from the school psychologist over the phone tell a different story, Broad Reading 99.8 % and a standard score of 144; Math was 86% @ 116, Academic Knowledge was 87% @117. So can she get into first grade? Not for another 2-3 weeks, maybe. They want to put her into kindergarten and have extension and differentiated enrichment while evaluating if she should be accelerated.
So we'll go ahead and have her start 1st grade at the Montessori School and dream of the enrichment we could have provided with the extra money to travel during the summer instead of teaching summer school to make up for it.
It just makes me want to pull out my hair.
