A funny thing happened to me on the way to preschool…

[Tigerle]

...at drop-off actually but I couldn’t resist the title!

I had resigned myself to living in a heavily red-shirting neighbourhood. Everyone whom I test the waters with (I usually just say we are considering entering DS early, his birthday being less than three weeks past the cutoff and within the three months’ grace period for early entry on parental request) will yell “nooo! Why would you! If I had to decide over again I’d redshirt at the drop of a hat!”. My PT complains every week about her younger daughter’s class of 21 kids in the local public elementary we are zoned for, 10 of whom have been redshirted (for “social” reasons) and who make her June-born daughter feel totally inadequate, skewing the grade curve on the basis of which tracking decisions are taken. More to the point, she feels that the local principal will redshirt anyone and grant early entry to almost no-one, which is inconvenient as she (as principal of the public school DS is zoned for) will be the one who has to grant the request even if DS goes to private school (we are considering either Montessori or a very well regarded Catholic school and hope this means she won’t care).

Usually, the preschool teachers are right in on this redshirting thing, and I have been dragging my feet about scheduling a conference in order to ask for DS to be entered for the K pullout next year, wanting them to forget DS’ very bad winter (if you recall, things were so bad he was evaluated for ASD, but are much better now) because I was sure they were going to ask us to wait a year for “social” reasons.

So imagine my surprise when at dropoff, while I was rolling my eyes at DS needing to be reminded for about the 7^th time to change his shoes, the headteacher walked up to me with a sheet of paper in her hands saying in this matter of fact voice “DS is on my list - have you made up your mind about whether you want him to start school next year or the year after?” I stuttered we hadn’t yet and had actually been wanting to ask for a conference to take their opinion and she said “sure! Let’s meet up in two weeks when your DH will be on vacation. But in the meantime, you may want to change his hours because the K pullout will be on Monday afternoon, and the deadline for changing is June 10^th. I’ll get you the form.” Um. Ah. Yes. Sure. I blurted “I guess in order to start school he ought to be able to change his shoes without being reminded forever” and she laughed, saying “yes a certain degree of independence would be a prerequisite” as she walked away.

Sounds like they wouldn’t think twice about entering him early. Imagine my relief. I hope they don’t come up with all sorts of doubts at the conference but it did not appear to me like they would. Whew. The great thing about this would be that if anyone (the elementary principal? neighbours? relatives? other parents?) asks, we can just tell them the preschool suggested early entry to us and we took their advice... pushy? Us? Oh no just pushovers... 

[Casha'sMommy]

I just had to tell you I love the title of this thread! I needed a good chuckle before heading off to bed.

Thanks

p.s.

Glad to hear things are going in this direction especially considering the year you've all had.

[St. Margaret]

A funny thing happened to me on the way to preschool

Haha, I had "Comedy Tonight" stuck in my head all morning, how perfect.

That's great!