As planned, I called the Montessori school to get a backup plan in place before visiting the public school. Yes, Montessori had openings in both "Elementary 1" (roughly 1st-3rd grade) and "Early Childhood" (kindergarten and preschool) and they'd be happy to let him try Elementary 1 if we'd like. And no, they didn't give homework, at all.
If Elementary 1 had a half day option we would have gone with that, but it didn't, so the public kindergarten was our first choice. I headed over with Matthew's immunization record. The administrator said they had no school policy about homework, so it was up to the individual teachers. However, she was adamant that they could only put him in one of the five kindergarten classes, the one with the least students. Two of the others were close enough numerically that I didn't see what the big deal was, but I decided to talk to the one teacher first, a Mrs. Barton.
Mrs. Barton explained that her policy was to give parents a set of monthly goals for skills for their child to learn, and that she did not assign homework as such unless a student needed more practice to achieve those goals. Sold! Guess we lucked out this time.
Rachel won't even have to do any driving -- I will drop him off in the morning, and he can ride the bus home in the afternoon since the budding juvenile delinquent on our street is in first grade, so will be on a later bus.
1 comment:
I am glad to read that everything worked out.
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