Our son's school year began mid-September and went downhill quickly.
He was at a charter that allowed movement up or down in level depending upon need. He had been attending for the past three years and last year things became dicey. I told him his fourth grade year would be better because he'd be mostly learning in place and wouldn't need to walk from classroom to classroom. While that was true, other problems surfaced.
Since he was straddling three different levels, he had five different teachers at once. Two of those teachers were new to the school and often the instruction given to him contradicted. He began coming home with stress headaches and started to lose weight. The icing on the cake was when his math teacher, who also is the principal, "lost" his completed math work and seemed unconcerned we wanted to review it. Even though she gave him a B grade on his progress report, she insisted he was too young for algebra anyway. When she went off on a tangent about our son's mental health, we pulled him.
Upon switching schools, he received a grade-skip that should remedy a lot of what had gone wrong at the charter. He's now in fifth grade with one teacher and is receiving challenge in his math through giftedandtalented.com in the classroom.
We hope the change is going to go well for him. If not, it's back to school searching.
