DD7 just finished first grade, and (a week before school was out) asked to be accelerated to third grade. We're agreeable to that, and her first-grade teacher was also agreeable to that, and suggested we do a "bridge" workbook over the summer to fill in any gaps she has.
Our state has a mandate requiring acceleration (or similar accomodation) upon demonstration of proficiency. "Proficiency" is a score of 90% or higher on a test that's keyed to the state instructional standards for that subject, in that grade. It's my understanding that our local district interprets the mandate as "you have to pass all the subject exams to skip a grade; if you only pass some, you're stuck with subject acceleration as the only accomodation we'll offer."
Going into first, I could look at the math standards by quarter, for instance, and she knew the first 3 quarters of first grade math before the year started. Not necessarily solidly, but well enough she didn't need a year of repetition. At the end of first, she knows the material through the first half of 3rd grade about that well. She's ahead enough to be thoroughly bored, but not ahead enough that passing the assessment is a no-brainer.
And that's making me nutso. I'm concerned that she'll miss one subject's cutoff by a small amount, because the exam asked about things she'd never heard of, but would have understood after even a small amount of exposure. If that happened, I don't think we'd agree to subject acceleration. Heck, I don't think we'd agree to subject acceleration if DD passed only one of the 4 subjects. DD wants "to be in a class where I'm in the middle" (in every respect - the only thing she's said she would worry about if accelerated was whether she'd be the shortest kid), and subject acceleration (IME) would make her extremely conspicuous.
OTOH, IMHO DD would be bored and unhappy as a public school 2nd grader.
I feel like I need a backup plan, and all of the plans I can come up with are lousy ones. The testing is July 28th-29th, and school starts August 12th. So there wouldn't be much time to get a backup plan into place once the testing is done.
The options I can think of are:
- Homeschool. DD is vaguely in favor of this (and has requested it from time to time), but she really enjoys the social aspects of school, and both of her parents a) work full-time and b) are anti-social hermits who never see any people other than immediate family and unavoidable co-workers. Plus, I (who would be the homeschool parent should we do such a thing) have a hugely seasonal job, and need school as full-time child care January through April.
- Local Gifted School. We did the tour for the 3yo program when we were looking at preschools, and hated it. The parent leading the tour had a 4.5yo who was in the 3yo room for the second year in a row, having been asked by the school to repeat it. The 4yo room was dead silent, full of tiny kids at individual desks, doing Kumon worksheets. They warned that children who entered in kindergarten would already be so far behind that they wouldn't be able to catch up. (This same school has what appears to be an excellent 5th-8th grade program, which offers scholarships to bring in kids from public schools, who, oddly enough, have no trouble catching up. If we were talking middle school, I'd have far fewer concerns.) I suspect DD would have no trouble catching up to their 2nd graders, but that it would be far more regimented / homework-oriented / "gifted means give them more work!" than we could tolerate. It would also mean ~90 minutes a day of commute for DD, and 2.5 hours of commute for me. (Public school is <1hr total of bus for her, and 30 minutes of work commute for me.)
- Multi-age classroom private school. Which would be the same place she went to preschool, and would be a 2nd/3rd mixed-grade class. I suspect they'd be willing to put her in 4th after a year, if the teacher thought she was ready, without any testing. This is another 90 min / 2.5 hours commute situation - if they weren't on the far side of town from us, it would be our first choice. But when she was a preschooler, the driving around was burdensome enough that we had a SAHP purely to accommodate the transportation. (Plus I figured it added 50% to the tuition cost in gas and tolls - and we can't swing the tuition, let alone tuition + transportation, without two incomes.)
There have got to be more choices available to me - I just can't see them. Anyone BTDT and have ideas?
