#Kindergarten age cut off free

“There’s no problem to have a December cutoff if schools recognize the needs of all children. “The younger the age, the higher degree of variability of what is normal or typical or standard behavior,” said Tovah Klein, director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development and author of “How Toddlers Thrive.”

That has some educators and parents rethinking the age cutoff.Įarly education experts note that in the younger grades, a child born even a few months later than peers might be in a very different place, developmentally speaking.

#Kindergarten age cut off free

But now that the city has universal pre-K for 4-year-olds and an increasing number of districts also have free programs for 3-year-olds - programs that children start at age 3 and 2, respectively - more children have access to high-quality education at a younger age, regardless of their parents’ income. New York City’s December kindergarten age cut-off is often seen as an equity issue: It provides school access earlier to more families who might not be able to afford early education. The age pushed upward as kindergarten became increasingly academic, experts have said, as pressure from standardized testing led to less time for play and physical development. Other states had December cutoffs decades ago, as well, but over the past 45 years most states have moved back their cutoff dates, according to the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit policy research group. New York City has historically had a December kindergarten cutoff, but principals used to have more discretion over whether students could delay kindergarten before the education department took over admissions six years ago, some parents said. Approaching the situation with that kind of flexibility is uncharacteristic of most public schools, observers say. Her school also discussed the possibility of letting the child repeat kindergarten next year - another practice that is uncommon in public schools nowadays. Once her daughter was able to nap during the school day again, it immediately solved the toileting problem, Baxt said. 15 - which has won recognition for its special education program and serves a high number of students with disabilities - made a few practical changes: They now send Baxt’s kindergartener to a pre-K classroom for nap time. Instead, teachers and administrators at P.S. While some schools may have worried about her daughter’s academic performance because of her reading struggles, the Red Hook school never suggested to Baxt that her daughter should be evaluated for an Individualized Education Program (IEP), a special education plan that mandates support for students classified with disabilities. 15, the school that Baxt’s daughter attends, found a reasonable solution for the little girl. 1 cutoff, children born in August - who are among the youngest in their classes - were more likely to be diagnosed and treated for ADHD, a 2018 study found.įor its part, Brooklyn’s P.S. To be sure, the youngest children in any given class tend to be at a disadvantage. “This relationship is statistically significant even when we controlled for other factors among the youngest cohort in our sample.” “When we looked at four cohorts of students by birth year - kindergarteners through third graders who were standard age for their grade in 2017-18 - we found that there is a strong positive relationship between being born later in the year and being classified as a student with disabilities,” said Sarita Subramanian, of the Independent Budget Office. Taking the six disability categories studied into account, students born in the second half of the year were roughly 20% more likely to be classified with a disability than children born in the first half of the year. By contrast, the intellectual disability category, which is for children classified with below average intellectual ability and life skills, did not positively correlate with birth month. Of all of the different disability categories, the “learning disability” classification - an umbrella term that covers academic challenges that affect a student’s ability to read, write, listen, speak, or do math - saw the largest positive correlation with birth month, followed by speech impairment, the analysis found. The study looked at students classified with disabilities across different early elementary grades in the 2017-18 school year, adjusting for demographics including race, poverty, gender, and English Language Learners. The Independent Budget Office’s new analysis suggests a deeper dialogue is needed to understand whether schools may be quick to label students as having learning disabilities when they might simply be too young for the demands of the coursework and the social-emotional expectations.