Dear Amy,
I hope your meeting went well, and that you are feeling better about things. I have been thinking about you a great deal--what a difficult situation. I hope you don't mind me chiming in late here.
I don't think you're being a wimp about your circumstances; you are trying in good faith to balance the good of the many and the good of the one (if I may be allowed to go all Star-Trekky for a moment). I think that parents find themselves in these kinds of dilemmas occasionally, and it can be very hard to decide what to do. Can I offer an example from my past, with the understanding that its relevance is likely only tangential, and that I am not in any way trying to tell you what to do? We can only look at things through the lens of our own experience--this is just a perspective through my own lens.
I went to a small rural K-12 school, whose enrollment meant that it was constantly teetering on the edge of closure. My parents (who were the only people in the village, other than the teachers, who had university degrees) spent countless hours of their lives lobbying the county and the province to keep the place open; mom was president of the Home and School (like your PTA) and dad was chair of the School Board for all the years we were there. All three of us tested gifted; I was accelerated once (the school wanted to do it again, but the second skip would have put me in a class with my sister, so my parents said no). My brother, who tested in the EG range, also had dyslexia and a severe, untreatable hearing impairment, so the teachers did not believe the test scores, which didn't mesh too well with what he was doing in school (they spent the rest of his years at school trying to figure out how he could possibly have cheated on the IQ test--the mind boggles). All three of us, but particularly my brother, were miserable at school for various reasons, but our parents were not willing to take us out of our school and try some other options; they simply had too much of themselves and their concern for the community at large vested in the school for our leaving to be on the table as a permissible choice.
So, we weren't very happy, but we all survived; my sister and I went on to become university professors, my brother is self-employed, doing something he's reasonably good at but doesn't like very much--but we all still wish, in varying degrees, that maybe we could at least have tried something different; my brother especially needed my parents to put his complex needs (which, to be fair, they may not have understood very well) before their activism on behalf of the school. I am not at all saying that your situation is identical, or even very like, mine, but I do think that in general terms there comes a time when the good of the one, in whatever way that may be achieved, supersedes the good of the many, especially when the one is young and vulnerable. I also believe, again in general terms, that some of these kinds of decisions have long-term ramifications.
I hope that I haven't said too much and that none of what I did say has come out wrong; I hope, too, that you are able to work something out with a grade skip with your school.
Best wishes,
minnie
