In other interesting news, the Des Moines school board has decided to close my kids' school, Edmunds, and merge it into another one. Budget problems (and wasn't that 1-cent sales tax hike supposed to cure all these ills?) is forcing the closing and merger of several schools.
I'm not terribly disappointed; everything looks like it's pointing us toward enrolling the kids at Norwalk in the fall... although we won't be able to do that if we aren't living there, because the deadline for applying for district transfers was January.
I'm also not terribly disappointed because my son's kindergarten teacher is transferring to another position in another school. At Edmunds, they combine kindergarten and first grade into blended classrooms, so there was a good possibility that Isaac would have Mrs. Couto again next year. We love Mrs. Couto very much and she has been a very, very good teacher... so if we can't have her, and if we're going to have to change to another school anyway, we might as well change to Norwalk and be done with it.
Isaac and his classmates performed some of their songs during a program this afternoon, and afterwards I talked to Mrs. Couto and asked her if Isaac was behaving himself. She laughed. Then she told me that he was well past a year ahead of his grade level in every subject, and that she had stopped benchmarking his progress after he passed the one-year-ahead mark.
At this rate, he's going to pass both of his sisters soon. He already passed Alice a long time ago (but that's okay -- Alice is doing things at her own pace) and I got Martha's end-of-year evals back today. If they actually gave out report cards, she'd fail both reading and math, although her math is much worse than her reading. We've already put in a request to have her evaluated for special ed services; I already knew that she was going to have problems across the board anyway, so no big surprise there. I'm toying with the idea of summer school, since they do offer it here, but it may make life miserable around here, and I'm not sure I want to go there. Decisions, decisions...
Isaac reads literally everything he sees... every sign, every label, everything. And does it amazingly well. He blew me away this afternoon by reading a bit of trivia off the school lunch calendar. Here's what my five year old read, perfectly:
Quick Nibble:
The Spanish brought beans back to the old world where they were valued as an ornamental, not as an edible vegetable.
I couldn't believe totally sounded-out "ornamental" without hesitating, then said, "What's ornamental?" He freaks me out sometimes.
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