It’s been somewhat awesome but mostly sucky in these first few months of Kelsey’s kindergarten experience. Let’s focus first on the awesome.

Kelsey has all satisfactory and outstandings on her first report card. She knows her letters, is a good beginning reader, is excelling in areas such as math and art, and is socially mature and making good choices. Her learning at school is really an extension of the years we’ve worked on these same things with her. But it’s all coming together so quickly, and she has confidence in her abilities and is doing great.

She’s writing words now. We sound them out together, and she figures out the correct letter and writes her words. She is a fast learner, and she remembers what she learns. She’s reading everything in sight and is hungry to learn more. She isn’t getting enough math in school, or science, but we cover these at home, and she is adding numbers and doing sequencing, fascinated with science, doing experiments all the time to discover what happens when you add ___ to ___ and then shake it up and put it in the freezer. *grin*

And the suck? Let me bullet them for you:

• Kelsey is having anxiety. She’s so nervous about the discipline structure of the kindergarten classroom that she doesn’t want to go to school. She is afraid of having to move her name from GREEN to YELLOW to the horrific RED, signifying one isn’t following the rules of the classroom. Staying on GREEN all week qualifies you on Friday to go into the treasure box for a cheap prize. Anything less gets you nothing. She has been on yellow once, and she was devastated, crying for hours. And despite my trying to make everything OK, she is now nervous about going to school to face the possibility of getting on YELLOW.
• She is having trust issues with her teachers. Last week, Kelsey came home from school and told me that her teacher had asked the class to laugh at a fellow student whenever he was doing something bad. These kinds of stories are hard to corroborate, I know, but it seems like a strange story for her to come home with. I believe her. There are a number of children in the class who seem to have discipline problems, and they are very distracting. I’m sure the teachers have their hands full. But I had to tell my child NOT follow those instructions, as it’s hurtful and mean, and that she needed to trust her own instincts about what is right and wrong. I never thought I would be teaching my 5 year old to rebel against authority. I was saving that lecture for age 12 *grin*.
• We are concerned for her safety. A few weeks before, I was running late picking up Kelsey from school. I expected to find her in the office, waiting for me, but when I pulled up to the school, she was standing in the pickup area all alone, looking forlorn and very confused. I slammed my Jeep in park and ran to her, asking her why she was out by the pickup zone (where anyone could just pull up and grab her) all alone, and she was confused, afraid that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be, but not understanding where she was supposed to be waiting. Allen and I called a special meeting with her teachers to discuss this safety issue, and they assured us that two older students (second graders) had escorted her to the office, but Kelsey must have left the office looking for me where I usually pick her up, and no one saw her go or noted her presence in the office even. The school has since changed its policy, and all students are brought to the office and checked in by a teacher. This still doesn’t help us sleep well at night, though.
• Kelsey is stressed out. She has homework every night in kindergarten. Last night (Friday night), she panicked at bedtime because she thought she hadn’t finished her homework. Her school didn’t meet AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) this year, so there will be even more homework to get the stragglers up to par so that the school can meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind so that they won’t lose funding next year. Most likely, the extracurriculars will be severly cut, things like P.E., music, and art. The children can expect endless repetition of worksheets, drilling them on the basics that are being tested. Children who know these will not be learning anything extra. Excellence isn’t rewarded. Only progress from poor to satisfactory.
• The expectations for how a 5 year old is supposed to act in school are unrealistic and developmentally inappropriate. We learned yesterday that there is a new discipline program at school, one that is set to begin on Tuesday. First, children cannot speak in the hallways. They must stay to the right and stay in line. They may only do the silent wave to others in the hallway, and must do anything that another adult in the hallway asks them to do. Good behavior will be awarded with tickets. Tickets will be put into a box. At the end of every month, the principal will randomly select two children to participate in a free McDonald’s lunch with the principal as their benefactor. Second, in the cafeteria, children can only speak to others when the music is playing. They may only use their quiet voices and speak only to the 6 people who sit at their table. They may not get up to, say, pick up a packet of ketchup they forgot when going through the food line. If a table is being too loud, a teacher will put a red cup on the table, signifying that they may not speak again until the cup is removed.

Children are, in essence, being trained to stop acting like children. They are being turned into machines. This school is transforming our easygoing, fun-loving, eager child into an anxious, withdrawn, hesitant child who doesn’t want to go to school.

We’ve decided to put her into a private school. We COULD wait for next year and hope that we make it into one of the charter schools or maybe make the random selection at one of the magnet schools, but we’ve decided that we can’t leave our children’s education to chance.

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