I just had the discussion about skipping grades today. The comment I hear a lot is about whether the child is ready socially. From that I take the comment to mean that the person would rather the child be bored to death in school than be immature for the grade. I’ve done the bored in school years ago… really for me it just made me tune out everything and not care to do the work…. Teachers frequently don’t want to add to their workload to differentiate the learning. (Which I do understand. Teachers today are underpaid and overworked besides having to deal with extra items like classrooms being targets that should never have been added to their job description.)
The problem is the kids are suffering. I don’t know how many times we heard phrases like “Doing too well academically to provide an IEP”. Our local school district has information about gifted education in their handbook but nothing in the schools available. The only option for us returning to the public school after homeschooling (COVID days) was to go not skip a grade and they offered to pull him out for ‘everything he’s ahead in’…. which meant that he would be alone in the principal’s office or by himself in a room working on advanced work all day (except PE)… I’m guessing he might have been left in the gen pop classes for social studies also… Talking to the ELA teacher at the time, the response was to assume he needed special ed because he was 2E. I’ve been involved with their special education classes as a long-term sub and at the time the primary teacher yelled and degraded the children, berated them for not bringing pencils if they forgot, and berated the students for wrong answers. I’d uproot our family and move somewhere else before allowing him to be in that environment.
The response I got from a board member to the statement that the public school wouldn’t let our child skip a grade, was to ask about whether he was emotionally ready… 2E kids that I know will never meet the emotionally ready standards of a neurotypical child. So you really can’t hold them to those standards. Yes there are bullies who will make school especially tough on them. The answer is not to hold back the gifted kids and keep them doing rote work that they have surpassed. The answer is to find a solution to stop the bullies.
