Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments anyone ever negotiate part time school?

My highly gifted 3rd grade daughter has disliked school since Kindergarten. She has been really bored and we have tried to work with the teachers at enrichment and differentiation. We have put band aids on the situation that have gotten us this far but we are needing to make some more serious changes this year.

We are going to talk about the possibility of a full grade acceleration but I have also been wondering if I could talk the school into letting me keep her home one day a week or picking her up early a couple days a week to do our own "gifted program" at home. (along with subject accelerations at school)

She goes to the neighborhood parochial school and the community is truly wonderful and loving and she has friends and her sister is perfectly happy so we feel kind of stuck.

Has anyone ever heard of such a thing working or have any thoughts on how to address that topic with the administration?

We did this for several years with a small private school. They were perfectly happy to have a student for 1-3 days a week (depending on the year; we tried various arrangements), for slightly more than prorated tuition (e.g., half tuition for 2 days). Our agreement was that their teachers did not have to provide any grades (we treated this as homeschooling, as far as compulsory schooling goes), and our child would have the option of participating in any classroom activities that the host class was engaged in on school attendance days, but that they were not obligated to do so.

After we had been there for a bit, they formalized the arrangement, so that other students now can enroll for any number of days, with the option of parent- or teacher-graded classes in any number of subjects. I admit that I may have had something to do with the development of the formalized program.

If you want to know specifics of the program, pm me.

Six years ago, my son did half days public school/half day homeschool...for half a year. After Christmas/Winter break we went to full time. One of the problems is that elementary classes aren't all black and white start and stop times. Special areas and lunch are always at the same time but time in the science lab once a week might be randomly scheduled in the morning when he wasn't there but they were supposed to be teaching him science in the afternoon. Or the teacher might allow time to work on the social studies report/project during writing time. It worked in a general way and he did fine but missing this or missing that or the schedule was changed due to this was too upsetting, we just decided to try full time, figuring that we could go back to part time if that didn't work.

Middle school is easier because each period has a beginning and ending...we always held part time homeschooling in our back pocket as an option during middle school. Only had a problem his 8th grade year with a bizarre number of substitutes and therefore substandard instruction leading to his frustration, but I went in and cleared up all the problems and he was once again happy. I never mentioned it to the school but told my son that it was an option if the situation wasn't resolved.

I think it's a great idea I think that in approaching the school, you need to try to predict ahead of time where this particular school's potential objections might be. A few I can think of:

1) Scheduling - it will help if the school has a standard schedule they follow (either every day or every week), so that she's consistently missing the same subjects.

2) Income - will this impact the school's income in any way? For instance, if the school is only partially full (has openings in her grade in particular), and if you're only giving the school the option of either letting you do this or you pull your dd out completely, the better financial option for the school is to let her enroll part time. OTOH, if the school is full and has a waiting list, then the school might object to you pulling her out unless you continue to pay tuition - because they have other families waiting in line to fill those slots. One student's tuition may not seem like a lot to a parent, but in both of the private schools I've been associated with, each students tuition actually does matter.

3) The school is concerned that if you do this, other parents will want to also. I don't know the best way to counter this, other than a sincere doubt that other parents would - it's not a typical situation and it's also not typical for a parent to have the flexibility and time to be able to do this.

4) The school thinks that pulling your dd out for part of the day will make it difficult for her to be socially integrated with the rest of her class. I think this is a weak reason for not doing it, since she'll be in class with the rest of her class for the majority of the week, but mention it mostly because it was brought up as a potential issue by school personnel when a friend of mine was partially homeschooling.

Good luck! I hope you're able to work this out!

polarbear

Thank you all so much for your responses. This is really helpful. We are meeting with the principal to discuss some options this week so we will be prepared with this idea.

Any one have any thoughts about how this would affect a 3rd grade girl socially? Do you think kids would be harsh with someone on a reduced schedule?

Depends a lot on the climate of the school. I think kids at this age largely follow the lead of the teacher. The one of mine that did this was in the school PT through 3rd grade, and really didn't have any issues at all socially. But the teachers were very matter-of-fact about it, didn't make a fuss or comment on it unnecessarily, and went out of their way to let me know if some special project, activity, or field trip was going to occur on an out-of-school day, so we could consider an extra day that week, or switching our in-school day. We had administrative backing, which helped tremendously. I also made a point of involving myself in the PTA, any in-class volunteer opportunities that I could fit around my work schedule, etc.