Preschool and Getting into Kindergarten

In the fall of 2015, Scarlett started preschool. She only attended half days, twice a week, but her teachers were still amazed at how smart she was, even asking at a parent-teacher meeting to confirm her age, because they thought she must be older. Nope, just a genius.

So we assumed that she would easily get in to kindergarten in the fall, though her birthday (Sept. 8) was one week past the cut-off for school, and she had to go through the "early-admittance" process. Turns out, the process was harder than the one I went through for college. There was a written application, a test with two administrators that tested her knowledge of stuff like letters and numbers, etc. And then a separate intelligence test administered by a school psychologist. She failed.

We were very upset, and since learning more about the process (calls with the principal who was in the first test, a school administrator, and the psychologist who administered the second test), we're even more ticked off about it. Apparently, for those kids wanting to enter kindergarten "early," they say they want them to be in the gifted and talented program all the way through school, and the scores they require on those tests show that.

But if you pester them enough about it, they'll talk straight. The last person I talked to said they see kids who don't make the age cutoff as "skipping a grade," so they essentially make them meet the requirements a first grader would need to have, not a kindergartner. Scarlett scored 117 - she needed 125 (apparently to qualify for first grade). So...yeah. We're working with her this year, so she can be super bored next year in kindergarten learning things she already knows.

Oh well, this gives her another year to do her job of "having fun and being a kid," as she likes to say. Here are some fun photos from preschool this year. They had a couple mom-kid and dad-kid parties, and the last photo kills me.