s/o Holding a kid back in high school vs. middle school--transcripts?

[ILiveInFlipFlops]

I've been following 4blessingmom's "holding back" thread, because this is something I've been contemplating too. (Both my girls have mid-September birthdays, so in many places, they'd legitimately be in a lower grade.) I even asked about this myself a few months ago, and the responses I got largely tracked with the ones 4blessingmom received, including the ones that said you could always add an extra year in high school if you needed it. 

 

What I'm wondering is, if you add an extra year in high school, how would that affect the official transcript you're most likely keeping? Would you then just allow whatever classes happened in the new 8th grade year to drop off the transcript, and then consider the old 10th grade classes to appear on 9th grade transcript and so on? What happens if not everything happens in the year it "should"? I might not be envisioning transcripts correctly, of course. But aren't you required to list the classes the student took in the year she took them? So if you suddenly decide to add an extra year to fill in gaps, won't it be apparent that there's a fifth year in there, or that classes happened out of sync with one another?

 

Or maybe your student needs an extra year in math and science, but not history or English. Won't it be obvious that they took an extra year for a couple of extra classes, because they wouldn't have carried a full load? Or are you allowed to shuffle classes from year to year, just so long as they were completed? For example, if your kid is successfully completing AP Lit in what you would have called her senior year, but then you realize that their math and science are not up to par and you give her another year of homeschooling, can you just say that AP Lit happened in her "senior year" along with those last sessions of science and math? 

 

I hope I'm making sense. I'm still trying to figure out what we're going to do too. I won't go into my whole backstory again. I have no qualms whatsoever in holding my youngest back. I'm not even questioning myself there--she needs the extra time. But I'm on the fence about my oldest.

 

Thanks for helping me sort this out in my head. 

[8filltheheart]

If I added a 5th yr, I would not drop English, b/c yes, it would be obvious that something was atypical. I would recommend a transcript format similar to what I used last yr with our ds who completed many credits prior to 9th grade. I categorized by subject going down the right hand column and had columns for <9th, 9th,10th, etc. I would simply categorize the new 8th grade as in the <9th column.

 

FWIW, I have never held a student back in high school, so my opinions are hypothetical. I completely disagree with the idea that kids should always be in whatever grade their age suggests. I have held a child back in K and it was absolutely the best decision.

[ILiveInFlipFlops]

Thanks 8, I feel the same way, in theory. I'm finding it hard to put into practice, though, because it feels like I'm trying to justify my own failure to run a rigorous homeschool, you know?  :blushing:

 

Thank you for the idea. I have a lot to learn WRT transcripts. I didn't know you could format them in a manner other than, "Here's what happened in 9th grade, here's what happened in 10th grade, etc." 

[kiana]

Yes, I'd just classify whatever happened before the new 9th grade year as "pre-high-school courses".

 

If the student needed an extra year in math and science, but had done good work in history and english, you could use the new senior year for a fun elective related to their interests in those areas. If they were missing what's usually a core course -- say they'd done American History in 9th grade (now 8th) and not again, one good solution could be to use the senior year for something like AP US -- another one could be to just do an advanced USH topics course without the pressure of the AP. MIT OCW has a bunch of special topics in USH.