# Shouldn't the really young kids at elementary  schools be separated  from the older kids?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shouldnt-the-really-young-kids-at-elementary-schools-be-separated-from-the-older-kids/752218>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [April 14, 2016, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shouldnt-the-really-young-kids-at-elementary-schools-be-separated-from-the-older-kids/752218 "2016-04-14T20:25:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![jz78817](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jz78817/32/1028_2.png) [@jz78817](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jz78817)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2016, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shouldnt-the-really-young-kids-at-elementary-schools-be-separated-from-the-older-kids/752218/21 "2016-04-15T16:50:35Z")

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I went to a Catholic grade school which was K-8, and IIRC only kindergarten was treated separately. AFAIK mostly because they wanted more supervision of little kids in their first year of “real” school.

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**Author:** ![Dendarii\_Dame](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/bbce88/32.png) [@Dendarii\_Dame](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dendarii_Dame)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2016, 6:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shouldnt-the-really-young-kids-at-elementary-schools-be-separated-from-the-older-kids/752218/22 "2016-04-15T18:34:50Z")

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My elementary school was K-6. Except in kindergarten, we weren’t separated from the older kids and we didn’t get let out any sooner.

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [April 15, 2016, 6:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/shouldnt-the-really-young-kids-at-elementary-schools-be-separated-from-the-older-kids/752218/23 "2016-04-15T18:41:23Z")

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> [@FairyChatMom](#):
>
> My daughter taught in a local elementary school. Each grade had its own block of classrooms, its own lunch time, and its own recess time. But they started and ended all together and rode the same buses. I don’t recall her ever talking about bigger kids bullying the little ones, and she’d taught both 2nd and 5th grade in her years there.

That’s how my school worked too; each grade level was more or less self-contained (except for G&T classes; those had multiple grades at the same time), but walking to and from school, or riding the bus was combined.

99% of fighting/bullying/interaction with older kids was walking to or from school. If an older kid rode the bus, I never even interacted with them in elementary school.

In middle and high school, we had fixed class periods, and classes that were multi-grade, so there was a lot more interaction with older/younger students beyond just what we had going to/from school.

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