Friday, April 22, 2005

school bureaucrats

My wife and I are going to put our daughter into a charter school for first grade, but we're currently amid a minor bureaucratic struggle to get her past year of schooling to count for kindergarten. (She missed the cutoff date in our school district by two weeks, which is what initially decided us in favor of homeschooling.)

Well, according to a letter I received today from the superintendent of schools, Evangeline is allowed to enter first grade -- as long as we can provide "the appropriate certification regarding the program that [she] has completed." Well, duh. It's a homeschool, innit?

We didn't use a curriculum for kindergarten, since there are no state core curriculum requirements for it and it isn't even mandatory for a child to attend kindergarten in Iowa. I've got a list of all the books Evangeline has read herself or had read to her, records of the classes we enrolled her in outside the home, and a nice portfolio of some of the projects she's worked on here at home, albeit rather few worksheets.

Can anyone recommend resources, people or organizations that can help us with this? I haven't wanted to put her into public school at all since we found out we were expecting, but this is the route we've decided on as a family, and I hate for a bureaucrat to tell us we can't do it because they don't like homeschooling.

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