My daughter is currently enrolled to start the Normal Park Pre-K program for the 2010-2011 school year. It is my understanding that because of your vote tonight, she will no longer be guaranteed admittance into Kindergarten at Normal Park.
This decision to not grandfather her Pre-K class into kindergarten is unfair, unreasonable, and it hurts my family.
Over a year ago, we started the process of organizing people to call the school for us on May 1, 2009 to get my daughter on the waiting list for the 2010-2011 Pre-K program at Normal Park. We had 30 people calling the school for us to get her on the list and we were lucky to get her on the list in the number 1 slot. I also started working a second job to save money for this Pr-K program. We only did all of this because admittance to Kindergarten was guaranteed from the Pre-K program.
If we had known a year ago that she would not be guaranteed a spot in Kindergarten, we would not have gone through all of this trouble to get her on the waiting list for Normal Park Pre-K. Instead, we would have explored other options that are no longer available to us because all other quality Pre-K programs are now full.
It is not fair to pull the rug from under our feet at the 11th hour. We went through the protocol to get her into a program that guaranteed her admittance to Kindergarten at Normal Park. Why would you not honor this guarantee and discontinue the guaranteed admittance starting with the 2011-2012 school year?
Now we have no other options, we either have to leave her at Normal Park for $5,000 without a guarantee or not send her to Pre-K. She is in Pre-K now at a wonderful church Pre-K program and we would have kept her there if we knew that admittance to Normal Park was not guaranteed from the Pre-K program. Now we do not have the option to send her to this church program because we gave up her spot when we were notified that she was in the Normal Park Pre-K program.
You have hurt my family and you have jeopardized my daughter's education by leaving us without other options. It is completely unreasonable to not grandfather students from the Pre-K program who started this process over a year ago. Don't you agree? How is this fair to my 4 year old daughter?
What can I do to get my daughter's class grandfathered into kindergarten from Pre-K? After all, principal Levine said at tonight's meeting that there was plenty of room for these 12 students in addition to the other 38 students from the Hill City community.
How are you going to correct this unfair treatment of families who did what they were supposed to do a year ago?
Please help our families!! Our children do not deserve this; we worked hard to get them into a program and now we do not have other options for quality education.
I look forward to hearing from each of you.
Thank you,
Brent Goldberg (Emmaline Goldberg's Daddy)