Heading out to a "yearly case conference" for my son. I'm going to bring up the possibility of holding him back in the second grade and maybe his maturity level will match better with his classmates, next year ... who knows?
We made a small presentation of ourselves, yesterday, as concerned, but confused parents, wanting to keep our son back a year, in order to demonstrate how the system they have tried to adapt to our son is not working. His high grades were the first thing they held up as reasons not to make him repeat the second grade, but I shot that argument to pieces by making them admit that credit for his incredible academic scores goes to him, my wife and me, far more than anything they are doing (since he is not doing their work, anyway) and making the point that he is in school to learn socially acceptable behaviors, mainly, since we are all doing a good job with most of the rest.
It seems that there are other alternatives that are available to us, which have not yet been tried. Sending me a note every other day about him not behaving properly and a check list of expected behaviors every week, with the "Needs Improvement" box checked off in every column is unnecessary. FUCK! I already told them he was autistic! He's there to gain some experience with kids he can have fun with, in my estimation. I think we shocked the crap out of them, when some realized that they had a lot more work to do for us than updating our son's educational plan. We need a whole new plan and they know we know it, so NOW(!) they are sending "smarter psychologists" from the state board to observe the weekly routine and offer suggestions. (at least it's a start)
Smart kids who can't throw or catch a ball are the rage, at our house. When they showed us the graph of the school's top scores with the top kids' names highlighted, his scores were in separate categories, above the whole school, which includes third and fourth grades, except for the math. There is one other fourth grader who has his math skills. He's got that part of schooling down - he needs some assistance in other areas, now, to catch up emotional-maturitywise, if he is to stay with his peer group.
Right now, I'm gloating a little, after stirring their comfortable jobs up, a little.