If your kid was asking you for a grade acceleration and wants to be in on the conference with the teachers to ask for it, would you let him/her be there? It would be a 6th grade skip & DS10 is in a gifted 5/6 class. The teachers have already said he will subject accelerate in math next year.

Tough call. I had a grade acceleration conference where the school had an institutional notion that it only ends badly, and the more we argued for acceleration, the more they reached for wholly irrelevant criticisms of my kid as reasons for rejecting it. I would not have wanted her in the room to hear that. Also, it would be all too easy for people to start speaking about her in the third-person invisible, which would only compound the rudeness for her.

But, if she's saying she wants to be there, I think she should have that right. She's the topic of the conversation, after all.

I used to run SpEd eligibility meetings, and I love to have students at the conference. Upper El, middle school students, it's often a matter of maturity whether we can get the student to be there. I was once in a meeting with 22 adults, which was intimidating for the child, but that particular child needed 22 adults on his case.

I've been in several meetings where the student was in the room for part of the meeting and out of the meeting for the rest. Once, we were talking about finding a student ineligible for Special Education. When the student came into the meeting, I said, "We're talking about taking you out of Special Education." The student's face lit up and nobody was going to argue against it after that.

The second best thing to having the student in person is having a statement from the child. I have new students write a page in their composition books on the topic "What my teachers should know about me," and sharing that page often changes the whole tone of the meeting.

As a teacher, I want the child's voice at a meeting whenever we can get it.