Officials in Washington, DC, have ended the practice called redshirting where parents enroll their child late into kindergarten.
Principals working for D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) used to be permitted to let families delay enrollment, but now there are no exceptions to the deadline even if the child has a doctor’s note, Axios reported on Tuesday.
Some parents are upset over the change and want the D.C. Council to take action in the matter, the outlet noted:
In the past, D.C. occasionally let some kids with birthdays close to the kindergarten cutoff wait a year to enroll — or redshirt. It meant that newly minted 6-year-olds could start school a whole year older than newly minted 5-year-olds.
This year, DCPS rejected requests from more than a dozen families trying to delay enrollment into highly rated elementary schools like Lafayette.
That means for kids who turn 5 by Sept. 30, it’s kindergarten — not an extra year of PreK4. For kids who redshirted last year, DCPS is saying to skip kindergarten and go straight to first grade.
The practice of redshirting began growing in 2012, and CBS News reported at the time that boys were twice as likely as girls to be held back.
Some parents’ reasons for holding their child back in this way was due to their emotional and social maturity or the fact they might have been diagnosed with a developmental delay, Today reported in August.
Director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development Tovah Klein told the outlet, “Redshirting is very much an upper class, higher-income, higher-educated family thing.”
Meanwhile, D.C. elites are unhappy about the recent change and angry with Democrats over the issue.
The Axios report cited D.C.’s Democrat mayor pushing back against upset parents: “‘We are not a redshirt jurisdiction,’ Mayor Muriel Bowser recently said. (The DC Urban Moms forum abounds with tips — and mostly failed attempts — at redshirting into DCPS.) ‘We shouldn’t have a policy to say we want some kids to be advantaged to the disadvantage of other kids,’ she said.”
