High school ages

[elizabeth_rice]

Hello! I'm writing a story set in the US (FYI, I'm not an American). My main character is a high school student. My question is: if my MC is 15 when he starts high school, when should his birthday be?

For example, say the student's birthday is 26th June 1997 (this is not my MC's birthday). So what grade would this student be starting in 2012? Ninth grade or tenth grade?

I tried to search this on google but the search results vaguely say "it depends when the student was born". Very unhelpful because that's precisely what I want to know.

If this varies from state to state, then I need this information for high schools in Virginia.

Thank you.

PS: should I tag my entry or should I leave that to the mods?

Comments

[elizabeth_rice]

Thanks for your reply. I have another question. It's important for my story for him to start high school at 15, and in fact the family had moved from another state (it's part of the backstory). Do you know which state has a different cutoff date from Virginia so my character is 15 when he starts high school?

[melannen]

It varies a lot - Virginia seems to have a statewide cut-off, but I know in some states it still goes county-by-county or even district-by-district (and sometimes a district is one small high school in a tiny rural town,) so you can probably just explain it by the fact that he'd moved from 'elsewhere'. I know some of my cousins were in districts with a Jan 1 cutoff, and some with a June or July cutoff, and some in September, and they were all in the same corner of Ohio, so if you don't have to be specific about where he was when he started school, you can probably fudge it however you want.

And if he's been moving around a lot, it's possible that he'd slipped a year behind because of missed classes or curricula not lining up or something (as someone mentioned below.)

Also, it's not that uncommon for a child, especially one with a birthday near the cutoff date, who is somewhat small or immature for their age, or behind in basic skills, to get permission to start school late, or to stay an extra year in kindergarten/pre-K. So if his birthday was late summer or early September, but his parents/teachers didn't think he was ready, it's possible they could have petitioned the school board for permission to keep him out another year, or to stay in pre-K or kindergarten even after he was technically old enough to be in 1st grade. (And they wouldn't necessarily think of this in terms of being held back, if it was before he started 1st grade.)

[elizabeth_rice]

Thank you so much for the explanation. This is good, I'll keep this in mind.