One of the children accepted a voucher to attend a private school and entered fourth grade at Morning Star School in Pinellas Park. The other two children spent the past 10 months reliving third grade, one at Blanton Elementary and one at Perkins.
It was a challenging year for all of them. Today, we update their stories.
L.A. King remembers well the May 2003 afternoon when she told her 10-year-old son he was being held back again. Martin Thomas, who has a processing disorder that makes it difficult for him to comprehend what he reads, had repeated kindergarten and was already a year older than his classmates.
New legislation required that all third-graders who scored at a Level 1 in FCAT reading must be retained regardless of their classroom performance. Martin would be one of 1,856 Pinellas children who were told they could not move on to fourth grade.
King and her husband, James, felt their only option was to take Martin out of Blanton and accept a state-funded voucher to attend private school. Martin's learning disability made him eligible for a John McKay scholarship, which paid $7,000 toward his tuition at Morning Star.
A year later, King said she has no regret about sending him to private school.
"He's happy and well-adjusted," she said. "He reads to me now. He helped his brothers with their homework. He's never done those things before. The work he brought home was phenomenal."
While the assessments Martin was given at Morning Star do not correlate exactly with state assessments, King believes her son showed improvement since last year. A test he took in August pegged his reading skills at the level of a student in the first month of second grade. The same test in March showed him reading at a third-grade level.
He also advanced to a fourth-grade level in oral language skills and writing, to fifth-grade caliber in verbal analogy skills, and a sixth-grade standard for his listening comprehension, King said.
She wishes Martin could have achieved the same success in public school.
"I can say nothing bad about Blanton," she said. "All I can say is that it's a shame all the teachers' great ideas are being washed away because they have to teach the FCAT. I truly think that because kids (in private school) aren't under pressure to perform for the state, they can perform for themselves."
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Marion Walker remembers how her granddaughter clung to her and sobbed last spring at the news she would have to spend another year in third grade. Kwansha Collins, 10 at the time, wanted her grandmother to tell her why she was being punished.
Kwansha returned to Blanton Elementary and at first tried to hold on to her old friends. When she realized they had moved on, she made one new friend in her third-grade class.
She continued to struggle with math and reading, despite her placement in a special program created for retainees. Walker couldn't understand why Kwansha's teacher wrote on her report card "She is working very hard to advance in reading" and "Wow! Great writer!" yet continued to check off the box that said "Your child is a potential retainee."
As the year wore on, Walker worried about Kwansha's maturing body, which set her apart from the other third-graders, and the fact that she was beginning to display anger toward her classmates.
"Kwansha was hitting other kids," Walker said. "They were picking on her, so she would fight. She's never been like that before."
Kwansha survived the FCAT - she is being promoted to fourth grade - but Walker is dismayed that after all Kwansha had been through, she had progressed only from Level 1 to Level 2 in reading, still below average for a third-grader.
Fearful that Kwansha will continue to struggle with the FCAT and worried that her frustration will eventually cause her to drop out, Walker has decided to send her to a private school. She hasn't figured out yet how she'll afford it.
"I don't have the money, but I'm not going to give up because of the cost," she said. "I've got to try. I've got to do something. I know we'll have other challenges, but it won't be the FCAT."
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Denise Dixon began calling Perkins Elementary in early May to see if her son, Darius Greene, was going to be able to move on to fourth grade.
"Darius was wanting to know, "Now do I get to go to the fifth grade?' " Dixon said. "That's what he was thinking, that if he passed he'd get to move up to where he's supposed to be."
She still remembers how he cried the day he learned he had failed third grade. "He made new friends this year, but he still misses his other friends," she said.
One thing that eased Darius' pain, she explained, was being allowed to move ahead in his music class. In March, the school gave him a cello of his own to take home as a reward for his progress in reading and math.
Thankfully, Dixon said, Darius was more confident this year entering the FCAT. She credits additional practice and the concern of his third-grade teacher from last year, who continued to check up on him to make sure he was okay.
When his scores came in, Dixon was thrilled to learn that Darius' national percentile rank went from a 45 to a 52 in reading. His math percentile rose from a 26 to a 56.
While she still wishes she could have spared her son from repeating the grade, she thinks that holding him back was good for him in the long run.
"It seems like he's where he should be now instead of struggling and stressing," she said. "He's matured."
