Pre-school daze

I'm becoming increasingly anxious about the upcoming school year, and it's more than six months away. It's now the season for registration for school, and I feel like I have to make a decision soon about Eliz. The local school, or the charter school, or a private school, or homeschool? Kindergarten or first grade? Now for most normal parents of most normal kids, I'd imagine that it's a pretty straightforward answer. But I have a hunch that Eliz just isn't a normal kid. She missed the cutoff for kindergarten last year, and it breaks my heart. How I wish her birthday was just two months earlier.

A partial list of the things she can do with ease:

Read fluently in English, and not-so-fluently in Korean.
Add and subtract to about 20. Count by twos, fives, and tens, to a few hundred.
Write neatly and legibly, using proper punctuation.
Tell time on a non-digital clock.
She's figuring out very quickly the concepts of north, south, east, and west. She's got a very good sense of direction, and also has a firm grasp of left and right.
She has a very rudimentary knowledge of piano, music theory, and appreciation. (This is mostly because I haven't really put in the time to teach her, not because she doesn't get it.)

Now I *KNOW* that this is more than the typical preschooler can do, and I'm pretty sure that many kindergartners struggle with some of these things. And just so you know, I haven't been sitting her down and drilling her for hours on end -- this is just stuff that she found interesting and picked up, mostly from her asking questions. We do have workbooks, but we do them when she feels like it, not according to any specific schedule. Sometimes it's five pages a day, sometimes two weeks can go by without her cracking open a workbook.

So why won't any school take her for kindergarten? Why am I having such a hard time getting her evaluated sometime soon so that we can know one way or another what grade to put her in in the fall? The past few months I have called our local elementary school, the local charter school, a few private schools, and even a few homeschooling ISPs to see if they will either take her a year early or even just evaluate her, and they have all told me that because her birthday is in late January, she's simply too young for either one, and that I'll have to wait until she enters kindergarten in the fall.

I'm so afraid that if she goes into kindergarten in the fall (instead of first grade), she will learn to associate "school" with "zoning out." She needs mental stimulation to remain engaged and interested in school. The last thing I want is for her to develop bad habits in the early years and then struggle later on because she never learned how to learn in a classroom setting.

It irks me to no end because there's a little girl in the next school district over who is in kindergarten, and she's a full month younger than Eliz. *They* were able to get her evaluated and into kindergarten because *their* school district will do that. Our school district, therefore, stinks.

Another thing that irks me is the fact that I don't have the same apparent luxury as those parents of kids whose birthdays fall later in the year. They are able to choose whether or not to enroll their kids or keep them back a year so that their kids will be a year older than their classmates.

Now the more I think about this, the madder I get, and the more I feel like Eliz is getting a disservice from the school district. But then a small, annoying, part of me makes me wonder, how much of this is tied to my own pride? Am I wanting this because it makes me proud to say that I've got an academically gifted daughter? Or am I wanting this because this really is the best for Eliz?

Anyways, I will let this issue rest once she's evaluated and a definitive answer is given one way or another. Hopefully sooner than later.