What if BUSD kindergarten doesn't work out?
Has anyone had experience pulling their child out of a Berkeley school partway through the school year? Specifically if the child is five-years-old? As I understand it, CA doesn't make school compulsory until age six. Trying to figure out our options if we don't have a great experience in the Berkeley school system next year. If we're really not happy, I'll try to home school until we can move/come up with a Plan C. I'm hoping it might be easier since my daughter will be under six. Thanks in advance for any advice you're able to offer.
Dec 26, 2017
Parent Replies
Poke around on this site: http://hsc.org/withdrawing-your-child-from-school-mid-year.html
and feel free to call their help line. 1-888-HSC-4440
So you child is not yet in kindergarten and you are already making plans to pull her out mid-year? Why? I'd guess that Berkeley Public Schools work out fine for north of 99% of students who enroll? Is there some reason that you think your daughter is going to be the exception? Why not go into the school year with a positive attitude that it will work out, rather than planning for failure? Even if there are issues you didn't mention, approaching the year with an optimistic attitude that you can work through any problem is more likely to produce a good outcome than coming in with backup plans because you are sure it will be a disaster.
But to answer your question, there would be no consequences from the school district to a 5 year old dropping out of school, even if you weren't going to homeschool. Consequences for the kid emotionally and socially, yes. Penalties for truancy, no.
Well, I think you're jumping the gun for sure. I bet you and your daughter will be very happy in a public Berkeley kindergarten. Why are you anticipating a problem? Of course you can pull your child from any school any time you like, but I don't think you will want to.
If you don't have a great experience with the Berkeley school system, you won't have a great experience with any school system. None of them are perfect. None of the teachers are perfect. None of the administrators are perfect. ANYWHERE. Home schooling won't be perfect either. And plenty of people complain about private schools. You'd be much better off approaching the school as if it will work for you. There might be issues that you have to address (our son was getting way behind in reading and no one seemed to care until we made them care) but that's how it's going to be anywhere. My husband had the attitude that if we could only find the right school, our child would miraculously and immediately know how to read and start doing well in school. You can see how foolish that is. My husband didn't want to do the 20 minutes of reading at night because it wasn't fun. He didn't support me in making it happen so I was the bad guy all the time. It took paying a lot of money to a counselor for my husband to finally understand that if we wanted our son to read, we had to make him read. Why am I telling you this? It's because your post seems to indicate that you have unrealistic expectations about school like my husband had. All schools have their pluses and minuses. You think that by moving you'll find the perfect school district? You won't. Your child's success is going to largely be a factor of how much effort you put into your child's education, regardless of where he/she is going to school. You have to make the kids do their daily reading no matter how painful it is. Now that my husband is finally on board and isn't making excuses for our son to not do his reading and homework, our son is doing his work and succeeding (and he feels a lot better about himself). We could have moved our son to 20 different schools but he wasn't going to be successful until we got on the same page and my husband stopped blaming everything on the school/teacher and started accepting responsibility. The schools with the really high test scores are the schools with highly involved parents who don't accept failure.