Nat, there are exceptions, andit's good that your experiance was so positive but overall kids start struggling around 4th grade, both academicly and socially.
It's very common and very universal, with both oral and Signing kids alike.
The reason why Clarke's dorm programs lasted so long, wasn't b/c a lot of parents were sending their little kids off to live in the dorms, but b/c until recently a lot of kids started struggling and transferred there for middle school.
A sucessful mainstream experiance tends to have to have the right ingreidants to be 100% sucessfull, and unfortunatly those ingrediants aren't always available at every single mainstream school. Heck, even a lot of the superstars have major social emotional issues....it's a VERY big issue at the Clarke School Mainstream conferences.