Do they want her to be the first of her friends to get a license, or to turn 18 - a legal adult - during her senior year in high school? The issue of when to begin kindergarten has implications beyond merely assessing the “readiness” of a 5-year-old, as parents project forward and imagine their child in the not-so-distant future. Still, many parents with kids whose birthdays are near the cutoff dates - both those who want to enroll their relatively young children and those who opt to redshirt their children - often find resistance from the district if they have strong feelings about their child’s readiness. And even if their child doesn’t seem completely ready for the experience, parents count on the school to address individual kids’ needs. Why would parents pay $800 a month?” she asked. Indeed, one South Dakota kindergarten teacher observed that when their schools went to full-day kindergarten, more parents sent kids who were on the cusp. Many parents want - or need - to send their child to public kindergarten in order to avoid paying for a full-time preschool program that can run to $30,000 per year in some communities. Even if all students were close to the same age in each class, in truth, there would still be wide variation in their social and cognitive development similar birth dates may mask this.
Those school districts that enforce compulsory policies, moreover, do so in order to ensure that classes are comprised of similarly-aged cohorts of students. These changes ostensibly ensure that students are more capable when they begin than children in the past. Kindergarten cutoff dates have been gradually standardizing for years, and nationally, most are now predominantly clustered in the fall. The Standardization of the Cutoff Dateīut the landscape of kindergarten is changing, and nowhere is that more apparent than with the cutoff date - that magical, somewhat arbitrary threshold that determines when a child will leave the family nest and march toward the big, fluorescent lights of the education system. What was the harm? It consisted of playing and play dough and finger-painting, and if children had trouble, they just repeated the kindergarten year while they got used to the experience of school. And others began when they were on the latter half of their 5s.Įssentially, children went to kindergarten when parents thought they should go, and sometimes, when they needed them to go. Tall or socially dominant (some called them bossy) children, or those whose parents worked outside the home, might begin kindergarten as early as possible, perhaps when the kids were in their early 4s. In the past, children started kindergarten when they were around 5 years old - if you were one of those hand-raising, number-spouting, pre-5-year-olds who could pronounce “photosynthesis,” then you went a little early. And even if all students were close to the same age in each class, in truth, there would still be wide variation in their social and cognitive development similar birth dates may mask this. We always encourage him to seek out things that are beyond him.”Īnd therein lies but one of the issues with kindergarten cutoff dates: These rules, which seek to impose a degree of uniformity on the age ranges of kindergarten classes by defining when children are ready to begin, obscure the fact that kids mature at different rates. “We would rather have him as an underdog … than an overachiever.
It could have affected his whole life,” said Shay, who wanted her son to be challenged. “He is exactly where he should have been. She felt enormous relief after the frustration of having gone up against a kindergarten cutoff. It wasn’t until five days before school started that she was able to persuade the principal to enroll her son in kindergarten. “They said everyone born on this date has to go into the transitional program,” said his mother Shay, referring to California’s pre–K/K program for children whose ages fall between preschool- and kindergarten-aged.
The District Cutoff Dateīut the Oakland Unified School District pushed back, saying that it was firm on cutoff dates.
He was, according to all of the adults in his life, socially and cognitively ready for kindergarten. He was an only child of a stay-at-home mother, and had attended a Spanish-English dual language preschool program for two years. He was almost four feet tall, and had been in the 99th percentile for height his entire life. His parents, his preschool director, and the principal of the local elementary school all agreed that he was ready for kindergarten. One boy in Oakland, California missed the kindergarten cutoff by five hours, having been born at 5 a.m.
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