Welcome, Dwayne! It takes a minute for new posters to show up in the feed, so sorry no one replied earlier.
We also had a relatively young first grader (a few years back!) who was wiggly and impulsive. On the whole, ours would have had even more difficulty with self-regulation if given less intellectual stimulation--which even the school staff acknowledged by the end of the school year.
With yours, repeating her due to nonresponsive staff seems, TBH, like forcing the child to take the consequences for adult failings. The data on retentions has been very consistent for decades, and finds that it is, at best, nonimpactful, and at worst, deleterious. There is usually a short-term bump in performance, followed by diminishing benefits until somewhere in the middle grades, concluding with losses compared to comparison peers by the end of high school.
Now obviously, group data do not determine individual outcomes, so for any given student-family-school combination, it is possible that repeating has good outcomes. But fwiw, the numbers do not favor retention.
In your position, I think I would let the OT have an opportunity to work with her on sensory processing strategies and accommodations. Even if the staff are not enthused, once they see the benefits to them (in reduced demands on staff for management), they may be more cooperative. Lukewarm staff, in my experience, respond better to concrete tools than to strategies. For example, many sensory kids do well with elastic bands across the front legs of their chairs as a kind of gross motor fidget (nice thing to bounce on instead of tipping the chair or tapping one's feet). Also it gives some body-in-space feedback. You can also try teaching her to wrap her feet around the front two legs of the chair, which stabilizes her in the seat, and gives some of that sensory feedback.
Your what-if question is fair, but also water under the bridge at this point! But as an academic point of discussion, really it's a question of which skill would have experienced developmental mismatch this year, and what would have been of more value for her and your family holistically. At least one of them would have--it just would have been different ones. You can speculate on that, but no one can say in hind-sight how it would have played out, nor could you have predicted it a year ago. As parents, we just make the best decisions we can based on the information and conditions we have available at the time.
