Not me, but zimaane junior skipped first grade. We moved during the school year and at the new school we asked if he could enroll as a second grader since he was academically advanced. They gave him some tests and said ok. It helped that he was big for his age, so he fit in well.
He ended going to an Ivy League college, so it worked out fine.
I wasn’t formally skipped because at the time it was thought to be a bad thing for child development, so the school didn’t allow it. But since my reading, writing, and math were at high school levels by grade 4, I spent most of grades 4 and 5 in the school library, reading a few things teachers assigned me, and then whatever else I wanted. Once in a while my homeroom teacher would come in and quiz me about what I had read.
It was the best time ever.
Oh, I did still have to attend phys-ed, social studies, and art.
I skipped third grade in a Catholic parochial school in the early '80s.
I did just fine academically, except my math skills suffered a bit for years after. My parents ended up buying me a top-line calculator for high school while we still had black&white televisions. 
Sucked at phys.ed. but I’m fairly certain I would’ve whether I skipped a grade or not.
My understanding is that the school (or possibly the entire archdiocese school system) stopped skipping not long after I graduated, as it was seen to cause more troubles than it solved.
Oh! Go ahead and vote. It just didn’t occur to me that schools allowed that - in our school system kids were allowed to skip from 10th to 12th grade, so although they too did effectively graduate a year early, it was as high school seniors not 11th graders. I believe it was so they were allowed to compete for valedictorian.
My school allowed planned graduation in 3 years. It even offered 0 and 7th our classes which were mainly for people who had failed the classes, but people who just wanted to finish early could take them as well, and could take summer school.
One of my best friends finished in three years with a combination of 0 hour classes, university classes (mostly advanced classes) and a couple of correspondence classes. She got accepted to Vassar, spent her junior year in Paris, and then went to graduate school in Belgium. Her major was biochem, and now she works for an international biotech company. I think she now speaks German as well, and reads Latin.
ETA: the school also allowed seniors who did not need a full schedule to take just the classes they needed. Some people without planning, discovered they could finish in 3.5 years, with the last 1/2 year being partial attendance.
The school started allowing this around 1978, and the drop-out rate went form something like 30% to 12% percent-- not the fail-out rate-- the deliberate drop-out rate.
I never skipped an entire grade, but I did skip a subject year-plus.
In 7th grade I was selected for the inaugural class of an accelerated-track math program in which I skipped the remaining semesters of middle school level math courses and went right into the first high school level math course – algebra one.
I didn’t enjoy it much at all and didn’t do particularly well in it, either (which was something of a blow to my academic self-image), but I kept plugging away at it for the rest of middle school, and as soon as I’d met the minimum number of college-prep-track math course requirements in high school – at the end of my 10th grade year – I happily tossed my math books into the bin and celebrated being done with the awful subject for the rest of high school.
With my math requirements out of the way and having taken extra academic classes to prepare for my planned college major, I had more than enough credits to have graduated at the end of 11th grade, and my school district would have allowed this. I would only have needed to take 11th grade English during the summer between 10th and 11th grades and then 12th grade English during my 11th grade year. But I would have missed summer band camp, and I didn’t want to do that.
Instead, I spent 11th grade stacking up AP courses (none in math of any sort!) and then my senior year I took 12th grade English, accounting (loved it!), and band (of course I wasn’t going to miss my senior year of band!), which very fortuitously were scheduled back to back first thing in the morning, and so I was done with classes by 11am. That freed up the second half of my weekdays, and I worked a 32-40hr/week job throughout my senior year and graduated at the expected time for my age (a couple months shy of 18, due to having a late summer birthday).
This is exactly the kind of flexibility schools need to allow-- your disliking your classes notwithstanding-- in my opinion. All-or-nothing double-promotions disadvantage a lot of kids, and leave foundering other kids who are advanced in one subject, but “merely” at grade level in others, or academically advanced across the board, but lack the maturity for double-promotion.
I know for a fact that my public elementary school did double-promote, but it was very rare. I went there from for 3rd, 4th & 5th grade (5th was as high as in went, and I went to a private Jewish school for the earlier grades), and knew of only two kids who were there during my time who were double-promoted, plus a couple who were early-starters, but by only about a few weeks, and the cut-off was fairly late-- age 5 by Oct. 1 to start kindergarten in the Fall, or a waiver of up to Nov. 1 if the kid passed a screening.
My private school had an earlier cut-off date. School started the day after Labor day, and you had to be 5 on that day to start kindergarten. You had to be 6 on the first day, or have completed a kindergarten elsewhere with a promotion to 1st grade and completion of a Hebrew school curriculum, if your K was not at a Jewish school, to start 1st grade if you were not 6 by the first day of school.
But a Jewish day school is more demanding than a public school. It has davening (in Hebrew) twice a day, Judaics class, Hebrew class, and mine went for four 7.5-hour days a week (Mon-Thurs)-- 8am-3:30pm, and a five hour day on Friday-- 8am-1pm, and we had homework beginning in grade 1. The Ks were longer than most public school Ks as well, running 3.5 hours, instead of 2.5. Since it was private, it also had the option of kicking out anyone who wasn’t cutting it-- it didn’t have to offer any kind of resource or other help to kids who were struggling, like public schools did. But it didn’t like doing that. It would rather just take kids who were ready in the first place. And I’m going to assume it didn’t have the staff or funding to do screenings of children who were younger but might be ready anyway.
Neither my primary nor secondary schools ever did it that I heard of. At primary, it would have been a bit meaningless, as it was a teeny tiny school- 28 students total- and extremely informal, so we were barely divided up by age anyway. We were for maths and English, but it was just a different table in the same room, and pretty common for kids to move between tables. I was mainly at the year above’s table for maths. but bounced around a little when they were doing new topics.
Secondary would allow kids that had been promoted (or, on rare occasions, held back- though as it was a selective school, I only ever heard of that happening for non-native speakers who’d been delayed a year to learn English) by their previous schools in along with the normal intake, but I never once heard of them moving anyone themselves.There was only one girl a year younger in my year group, which was about 120 students. She did OK, but I’m not sure it really benefited her.
Schools here do seem very reluctant to diverge from the standard ages. One of my friends really fought to try and get her kid to start a year later; his birthday is just 4 days before the cut off, and his language and social skills were not good for his age back then, probably due to mainly speaking German at home. In the end the family moved back to Germany, where they start schooling a year later (the other part of the reason she wanted him held back), for a year, to force the issue. While obviously I can’t know how he would have done had he started normal time, he does seem happy and confident, and right in the middle of the class for most subjects, so it was probably a good call.
I was never skipped. Just as well as I was the youngest in the class (birthdate, 9 days before the cutoff). But at the end of fifth grade, the teacher complained publicly to the class that she had been ordered to skip 2 boys and 2 girls and that, while 1 boy and 2 girls were easy enough, she had to pass over 11 girls to get to the second boy. So that means she had rated at least 15 students (in a class of probably 35) ahead of me. That still bugs me a bit. Basically she disliked boys.
My daughter is 17 months older than her brother. His birthday being July 1, he was one of the younger ones in his class, while his sister was just about in the middle of hers. Nonetheless they wanted to skip past 2nd grade into her class. We put our foot down on that and the school principal agreed with us. Later when we spent a year in Switzerland, they spent the year together in a combined 3rd/4th grade school. But when we returned they then went into 5th, resp. 4th grade on time.
I didn’t skip a grade but my younger sister was moved from kindergarten to grade 1. I was in kindergarten in the 1958-59 school year, my sister started school in 1961. I think I must have flunked recess so I didn’t get to accelerate.
I know the school suggested at least twice that I skip a grade, and my mother turned them down, flat. I was already one of the younger kids in my class, as well as the fat and awkward kid who seemed to have a “Bully me” sign permanently on my back.
Freshman year in high school I wound up in class with a number of kids who had skipped a grade somewhere along the way. From what I can see, it didn’t seem to set any of them up for high school any better than the rest of us.
When I was in 2nd grade, the teachers at my school floated the idea of skipping me up to 3rd grade with my parents; I was probably the smartest kid in my class, and the course work for 2nd grade was proving to be so easy for me that I was getting bored.
My parents decided to keep me at my normal grade level, and though they couldn’t have know so at the time, they probably saved me from additional future social anxiety. Though I was getting along just fine with most of my classmates when I was in 2nd grade, by the time I was in 6th or 7th grade, I wound up being very socially awkward around the other kids in my class (an issue that persisted through high school), and I imagine that it would have been even worse if I’d been a year younger than my classmates.
FWIW, though, sometimes it does work out. I remember one girl I went to school with, who was a year ahead of me, and nine days younger. She was also three inches taller, and a bra size larger (which wasn’t nothing, let me tell you-- I was the first girl in my class to wear a bra), and could easily have passed for 19 at 16. But more to the point, she had amazing social grace, and maturity. Plus, a voice on the phone that you could have mistaken for a 30-yr-old. We always had her order the pizzas.
I don’t remember whether she started early, or was double-promoted at some point, but it must have been nice to be where she was, and be at least shorter than 50% of the boys. I don’t know what she’s doing now, but I know that she got accepted to both Vassar and Sarah Lawrence, so she wasn’t struggling at the grade she was in.
There was a boy who was in the pictures of my first grade-mates (that is, the kids in my 3rd grade class in public school, back when they were in 1st grade), and then in first grade again the next year. He had dyslexia, but it didn’t get diagnosed like it does now, and so he got held back for not knowing how to read-- at all. His parents put him in a summer program for dyslexics at their own expense, and he did much better his second year, but he was always the star athlete in the class. He wasn’t a lot taller than the other boys-- he might not even have been the tallest-- because he was pretty young, with a summer birthday (they lived just two houses down the street from us), but he was by far more coordinated, and strong, and was on all three teams in middle school, plus picking up wrestling in high school, then getting a wrestling scholarship to college. I’m not sure how his age affected his eligibility in college. It may not have, since he had a summer birthday.
Anyway, when he was first told he had to stay back, it was probably demoralizing, but all in all, he did very well.
I also knew of a kid in my jr. high who got retained who was a foster child, and got transferred, and missed a lot of school, because he parents were trying to get her back, and she had to go to hearings. I don;t think she ended up graduating, though.
There was one girl who secretly impressed me, though. She got pregnant, and missed a year after she had her baby, but then she went back, and finished. So she finished at 19, but she finished. She even said at one point that she could be a better mother with a high school diploma.
I’m not sure what the law is. If you are disabled and on an IEP, you can legally go to public school until you are either 22, or have a high school diploma. I don’t know how old you can be and still attend if you have not attained a diploma, but are not on an IEP (that is, disabled under law). But you definitely can attend until 19 in the state of Indiana, especially since the revamping of the kindergarten curriculum, causing lots of students not to be able to start K until age 6 (some systems screen every single kid). I’m presuming you can probably attend until you are 21 even if not on an IEP. But I know that PL 94-142 (The Education of All Handicapped Children), which is a federal law, says 22 for those on an IEP. And they don’t get kicked out at 22. They can attend until the end of the year in which they turn 22. My son has an October birthday, so were he on an IEP, he could attend until 22 & 7 months, since the year runs from Aug. 5 - May 22.
Kids who are retained a year are not necessarily on an IEP, but kids who are retained more than one year probably are.
I guess it just wasn’t done at my school – I didnt know a single kid who ever skipped, and only one I can think of who was held back a grade. The only exception was a boy who graduated at 14 and went straight to college – he whizzed past me in grade ten. Became a psychiatrist, but as far as I know, not a particularly noted one.
My parents refused to let me in the 2 year SP program, so I went into the 3 year one. Good move. I was young anyway, so it would have been a disaster. Plus if I had been a year ahead I would have likely been drafted as my 2S deferment ran out. (My draft number was 11.)
My son-in-law did skip a grade and it was a disaster.
We held my younger daughter, who was born days before the cutoff here, back from kindergarten, so she was almost a year older than the rest of her class. Worked great.