My HS treated 18+ students the same as minors unless they stopped living with their parents or were married. Married students under 18 (even though they weren’t minors) needed their spouse’s signature. Parental consent was even needed for over18s to donate blood (yet 17yr olds could donare at outside drives on their own). Oddly I was able to change my name in all school records at 17 without my parents’ signature or any kind of court order.
I could sign permission slips at 18, but couldn’t call in sick at school.
When you are 18 you aren’t required to go to school so the police can’t come and make you go to school but if you do go you have to follow the rules.
And yes, if you don’t go to school they kick you out, as in you aren’t allowed to come back in the school to cause trouble. If you wanted to go to school for an education you wouldn’t be signing yourself out all the time.
Really? That’s bizarre. What if their spouse was younger than they were? Say it was a 17 year old and a 16 year old?
Whatever the school wants to say, you can still, as an 18-year-old, do as you please. You’re 18; what legal structure would prevent you from excusing yourself from school?
Good point, RickJay. I have to ask–if you’re 18, and a legal adult–how can a high school/parents/state tell you what you can or cannot do? When I was 18, I was writing my own late slips, my parents were not involved (legally they could not be), and if I chose to skip class or show up late, neither the school nor my parents could do anything. What happened to change this?
Legally they can’t make you go to school.
Once you’re 18, your parents also can’t legally make you come home at 11 PM or 2AM or whenever they set your curfew.
Before you are 18 your parents can report you as a runaway or etc. if you leave the house and don’t come back, and I believe the police can and will physically return you to your parents if they find you.
Your parents basically have the right to make you stay in your house or anywhere they say (within the bounds of reason) before you are an adult.
Likewise truancy laws mandate you go to school, and if you miss too much school you get in trouble with it, if it becomes a chronic problem your parents could lose custody of you and you could even be placed in an institution where attending class is pretty mandatory and there’s no way out of it.
However for most states truancy laws only cover persons under the age of 16, once you are 16 in most states you can drop out of school, although technically only with parental approval (I say technically because if you really just want to get yourself dropped out it’s easy enough to do something guaranteed to get you expelled or whatever.)
Different school districts, likewise, have different policies governing their students. Most school districts have an attendance policy. For example, if you skip school that earns you detention. At the school where my sister teaches, detention for behavior and detention for tardiness is different. Tardy detention is 30 minutes before the start of classes, and no discipline form is filled out. Detention for disciplinary reasons is one hour after the end of school, and a discipline form is filed out and kept on record. Skipping an entire day of school without your parents calling in or signing in or somehow informing the school they approved of your not being there is considered a disciplinary matter, and instantly gets you a write-up and three days disciplinary detention. If you don’t attend the after school detention, you get an extra day. If you don’t attend two days in a row you get a whole new slip written up and three more days of detention.
So say you decide to skip Monday, that gets you 3 days detention. You decide to skip Tuesday, that gets you 3 days detention on a NEW slip, you also missed detention on Tuesday which adds another days detention so you have a total of 7 days now, and two disciplinary write ups. If you keep doing this eventually you have enough disciplinary slips that you start running afoul of school policy concerning X number of disciplinary write-ups in a given semester. You hit X, and the school can suspend you from school for 1-3 days (after a certain point I think they have to suspend you for some amount of time due to county policy.)
If you continue getting more and more disciplinary slips and suspensions, eventually you get to the point where you can’t attend school anymore and can’t pass your classes, thus can’t graduate (this has happened to a few of her students, to actually get this bad you have to miss many many days of school consecutively with no parental approval.) Taken to an extreme you would be expelled and wouldn’t be allowed to attend any public school in the county for a 365 day period with the exception of one school specifically set up for students with disciplinary problems.
Basically, they can’t legally make an 18 year old go to class, but if you run afoul of their policies enough they can make it impossible for you to graduate. Which is a fairly big consequence if you have any occupational or higher educational aspirations.
If you’re in California and get caught doing this, you can also be the super cool guy who gets to pay the super cool fine for providing tobacco to someone under 18. Well, unless you’re just talking about smoking around the under 18 friends.
For the posters curioius about how the school can force someone over 18 to attend: they can’t. What they can do is dismiss the person for excessive absences.
Forgot the disclaimer: my comments in the post above are, of course, IMHO.