In an ideal world, the best thing for kids with disabilities would actually be to be in school at the appropriate age WITH services so that they can get help. Or a 504 so accommodations can be made for weaknesses and they can still benefit from learning in other areas. Of course it doesn't necessarily work out that way. DS has developmental coordination disorder and has a winter birthday so when he should start was never really a question. He was right in the middle of the class in terms of age (towards the young end though, probably). He did struggle with things (the glue bottle and getting caps off markers, coloring and writing comes to mind), however school was like free OT. He was working on the things that he needed to work on, which wouldn't have happened nearly as much if I had kept him home for an extra year, taking him to private OT once per week. So instead of falling further behind for his age, he was able to gain some skills and climb the percentile chart for motor skills. If a disability is so severe that it is going to lead to nothing but frustration and failure, then things are different, but in that case the child should technically be receiving special ed and getting special services to gain needed skills. I can understand why it makes sense to hold back in some cases, but if schools were actually individualizing instruction to each child's needs it technically shouldn't need to happen, and kids with disabilities/delays wouldn't struggle needlessly in school.
Yes! This is how the system is supposed to work. I will always remember the student I had who was held out of kindergarten until age seven, because the parent thought you couldn't send a kid to school until they were toilet trained. This was the minimally-verbal, toe-walking, hand-flapping kid. Kind of an extreme example (and what pediatrician was seeing this kid annually without alarm bells going off?). But the point is, a lot of parents think kids need to be ready to go to school, when the point of preschool child find is to identify and remediate those kids who are not ready.
