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]

I'm very interested in this because my character's family moved to Virginia. So do you know which states have a different start-of-school age so my character starts high school at 15? Thanks for the information.

[busaikko]

http://www.superpages.com/supertips/age-to-start-kindergarten-by-state.html lists the kindergarten start dates by state. This list was probably posted within the past 5 years, but it gives a general idea. Your character was born in 1997, so you'd need to find a state with a suitable start-date and then find out what their policy was in 1997... or really? You could probably use current data or make it up in a vague way, because as the US has different dates for different states, people are entirely blase about classmates being older/younger, and likely readers won't know for sure either. (Also, boys are sometimes held back a year by their parents so they'll be more developmentally able to handle school, starting a year later.)

[elizabeth_rice]

Thanks so much for the link.

because as the US has different dates for different states, people are entirely blase about classmates being older/younger, and likely readers won't know for sure either. (Also, boys are sometimes held back a year by their parents so they'll be more developmentally able to handle school, starting a year later.)
This is good to know and I'll keep it in mind. Thanks. :)