I reached out to our guidance counselor recently to let her know that a 6-year-old with no English will be arriving in the middle of next school year. She in turn spoke with the ELL (English Language Learners) coordinator for our school district, and then we met last week.
I had been expecting to place Jeremy in kindergarten, to start him at the most basic level. I figured that many parents don't start their boys in kindergarten until age 6, and he is very small, so he would be fine.
However, it turns out that the district's policy is to place children in an age-appropriate class. The counselor explained that it will actually let them give him more support, since we only have half-day kindergarten and he can get up to 2 hours a day of ELL support. If he got the most language support, he would miss much of kindergarten time anyway.
Since he has been in preschool and is familiar with that kind of routine, we think that will give him a leg up on some school readiness skills, even not knowing English. He will attend ELL while the kids in his class are doing language arts work, so he won't miss everything else going on in the class. Our school only has a handful of other ELL students and none (that they know of at this point) is in first grade, so he will get individual attention.
It would certainly be easier for me if he were in first grade for the full school day, since he could go to school and come home with Caroline (Leah will be in middle school next year). As a bonus, I wouldn't have to pay for day care for the other half of the kindergarten day!
On the paperwork front, I'm waiting to hear what my log-in-date (LID) is. That's the date when my dossier (which has been sitting in China for more than two weeks now) is pulled out of a pile, logged into the system and sent on to translation. Translation can take two months, so it will just be good to know that I've moved into that phase.
Slowly, we are moving forward!
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