In our county, children can't start kindergarten unless they turn five by September 1. Theo obviously misses that deadline, with his birthday in October. There is also a rule that says that if they turn five by January 1, they can apply for early admission. The application process consisted of a some questionnaires and a standardized test. I took Theo to take the test, but I didn't get to listen in or see any part of it.
I got a letter back at the end of May saying that Theo was not accepted. According to the letter, each kid is rated as Advanced (A), Proficient (P), or Basic (B) in six categories: reading, general knowledge, parent developmental checklist, mathematics, graphomotor/writing, and non-familial developmental checklist. You have to have an A in at least 4 out of 6 categories and no B's. Theo got A's in 3 categories and P's in the other three categories.
The thing was, he got a P on the parent developmental checklist...which was something I filled out! It was something of a true/false quiz. Answers could be given as Always, Sometimes, or Never, and for nearly every category, I really felt like it was impossible to circle Always, because who Always does anything? I mean, even grown adults do not Always "persist with tasks long enough to complete them" or "resolve conflicts appropriately." Anyway, I felt awful thinking that I was so fixated on the meaning of Always that Theo lost a very important point on his overall assessment and wound up being rejected for early admission.
So I wrote a letter of appeal saying as much. We got a letter back with a
second rejection, but the explanation was a mess. It said,
Upon reviewing the file ourselves, we found Theodore scored in the Basic range in (#) areas. In order to be admitted to kindergarten, 4 of the 6 categories must be rated as Advanced and no category can be rated Basic.
When I read that, I thought first of all, it didn't seem like anyone addressed what I wrote about in my letter of appeal. Then I thought, "What if they are sending me the rejection letter for another child?" because in the original letter, it said that Theo didn't score basic in any of the categories. Then I thought, it is so obviously a form letter, because they couldn't even be troubled to replace the "#" with an actual number, and you know how form letters are often filled out by people who don't do the actual thinking.
So I called the Board of Ed and spoke with a secretary, who initially was treating me exactly how she would treat any other parent who mistakenly thought her child was smarter than all the other children. I explained to her though that I didn't think there was anything wrong with the process they used to evaluate kindergarten readiness. I really tried to emphasize how dumb I felt about overanalyzing the word Always. I had to explain a couple of times too, in a couple of different ways, because I felt like her responses to me weren't addressing my concerns. The words that I used that finally changed her answer went something like this: "I messed up when I filled out that questionnaire...it ended up reflecting me as a person rather than my son...because it was the last point he needed to get into kindergarten, I feel like I really messed this up for him." So she said she would talk to someone about it, and I thanked her.
I got a call back twenty minutes later from the same secretary. She said that the director reviewed Theo's file and decided to accept him.
Hooray for Theo! Time to buy crayons and notebooks!
