I recall back in the 1970’s my parents summer vacation caused me to miss the opening day of school. The idiots started school before Labor Day and we were still traveling. It was no big deal back then. My folks sent a note and it was an excused. Dad had to wait and take summer vacations whenever he could get off work.
Schools today seem different from my experiences. They are so rigid and inflexible. Rules are practically chiseled in stone. It seems like there’s no common sense in school rules these days. I’m constantly reading news stories of kids getting expelled for facebook messages, the wrong clothes, piercings etc.
They expelled a girl (good grades) for the rest of the year last week for taking the wrong lunch box to school. It was her dads lunch and it had a small paring knife to slice his apple. They show it in the video. It doesn’t even have a sharpened point. The recent press has the school board calling a special meeting to rethink their actions. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/school-officials-deny-nc-girls-lunchbox-story/
Every rule
I graduated in 2003 and a parent’s note always worked, unless it was for 3 days in a row. Then they insisted on a doctor’s note. When I was in grade school we used to go down to Florida for about 2 weeks in February or March. They had to get permission in advance under the “educational trip policy” and my teachers would sent a bunch of assignments with me. This was also why we started doing a side trip to St. Augestine (which I loved). This was in a public school.
When I was in highschool a parent’s note was always fine for me. My mom wasn’t always in the best condition to write such notes (on heavy, much needed, pain killers and knocked out often) so I would just do the notes myself.
On a simliar note, I am listed as a “safe adult” on my younger brother’s emergency contact card, and I can check him out of school/write notes for him.
Depends on the school. Some will only allow medical absences to be “excused”. If you miss for a family vacation, those will go towards your “unexcused” absences which, if you rack up too many, might equal a suspension (which makes perfect sense in Ironyland: let’s make the kid not come to school because he isn’t coming to school enough. Uh-huh.)
But at other schools, they’re much more liberal, and may allow parent written excused absence notes for certain things (religious holidays, death in the family, doctor’s visit, mild illness) but not others, or for anything at all.
And in all honesty, some schools will write one thing and enforce another. If you’ve got a good kid and he makes up the work and his grades are good, they’re very likely to overlook a few unexcused absences, even if it’s just for a vacation.
I suspect the Obama girls are pretty good students (if he was my dad, I sure would be! Or I might get one of those famous lectures!) and may even spend some time on their vacation doing their schoolwork, anyhow.
I recall in 8th and 9th grade I checked in/out of school for my Orthodontist visits. Usually to tighten the braces. We gave the school a doctors note for the school year and they were happy. The Orthodontist office was a block from school. I’d walk over and be back in less than an hour.
I had the same experience my first two years of highschool, except my Orthodontist was across the street, so the office workers watched you to make sure that was where you were going!
In my kids’ school district (public) only medical absences are excused, and you have to have a doctor’s note. Other absences are unexcused and if you rack up too many there’s probably a consequence of some sort, although I have no idea what it is because we’ve never come anywhere near the number of unexcused absences you’d need to have for it.
In the past I’ve pulled my kids from school for family vacations and the like, and the school secretary gave me the hairy eyeball when I told them about it but there were no other real consequences.
Depends on the state, the district and sometimes even down to the teachers and principals.
Some states have mandatory attendance laws. Excessive absences senses will be reported to social services and checked out. Some states don’t have those laws, but the districts will still report after a number of absences. In some cases the policies are written that unexcused absences will trigger action, in some cases any number of EXCESSIVE absences will trigger an inquiry. Usually there is room for subjective judgement…i.e. a child missing a lot of school because mom is dying of cancer is different than a child missing a lot of school because mom can’t be bothered to get her kids out of bed in the mornings. A child missing two days for vacation might be ok - one that misses two weeks over the course of the year might be problematic.
Elementary school policies tend to be more lenient. By high school attendance can be a bigger deal with individual teachers setting policies about make up work - what might be fine at a district or state level might still have you failing Trig because you can’t make up pop quizzes without a doctor’s note.
I remember from high school that missing more than 20 days total (out of 180) would lead to either failing the year or simply being dropped from the attendance rolls if you were over 16. Technically school sponsered trips (including the senior trip) didn’t count toward the total, but if you had too many absences anyway the school wouldn’t let you go.
We expect a parent to call in before school so we know where the kid is. We don’t want someone leaving for school and not arriving if Mom thinks he’s at school and we think he’s at home. I think the students get ten absences like that, but then we require a doctor’s note. We only get paid if the kid is there, and it’s hard to do well on the ISAT if you miss instruction. Vacations are considered unexcused but there are no consequences.
I missed a lot of high school – a lot. And the punishments were non existent.
I’m hesitant to tell this story, for fear someone will copy me, but most people will slip up and get caught, and more likely is a parent will read it and think to check up on things taken for granted.
I filled out my “parents contact form” myself, signed my dads name, used an online phone service (Grand Central, at the time, it turned to Google Voice sometime after I started using it) and got the mail that went to the house myself. I skipped classes at minimum once a week (each class, at least once a week), and as often as I did, there were three calls about me skipping from teachers – all in my senior year, and all resolved by telling the teacher “my dad told me to tell you he spoke with me and once of the vice principles about it.”. Once, we got a letter about me “potentially” hitting some nonspecific marker for absences. It was 10 unexcused absences ia year, and I was already at like 12 or 15, ditched it and ignored it.
Schools really just don’t care that much, ime. I was in a school with 2,000+ kids (but a decent school), but there were also a ton of staff, so maybe I got lost in the shuffle, but after 4 years of my shenanigans I’d think that theyd put a flag on my file if it was important.
I remember in the late 90s that El Paso had all sorts of (IMHO) stupid attendance rules. This may be due to federal and state funding being tied to attendance.* For a district that gets most of its revenue from local taxes, that may not be an issue, but IIRC EPISD gets about 2/3 of it’s funding from the state and the feds.
*I’ve been told this, but I don’t know how true it is. I spoke to a student recently who told me they take attendance at like 10 AM or something. As long as you’re there for that, you count as present. The schools ask that all medical appointments be made so as to avoid missing the attendance check.
Yes, and they have been threatening with jail time before that. My son had several runs of illness last year, and I received a certified letter from the school letting me know that I had to have a doctor’s note, and that I was putting myself in a position to be jailed for not properly educating my kid.
I responded in two ways:
I sent my son to school no matter how he felt. I told him that if he need to throw up, to be sure to do it in front of a teacher. At that point he would be sent home by the school instead of being kept home by me. Yep - I was an asshole to other kids I admit it. I told the Vice Principal that he had given me no choice. I also had a conversation with a member of the school board about it, and he calmed me down and talked to me about what restrictions the schools operate under, and who they are really trying to target - the parents that allow too much absenteeism.
We went to a private school this year that operates with a different mindset than the public schools use.
I am sure that Sidwell Friends has no issue with the Obama kids, same way my sons private school is much more flexible as well on this subject.
It varies. I was born in 1974 and lived in a suburb of Chicago. We started school after Labor Day when I was a kid, but somewhere in maybe junior high they moved the first day into August.
Chicago Public Schools still start after Labor Day, though. And they have a hell of a time in some schools getting students there the first day even then.
I went to High School in New Zealand where a parental note was accepted as a valid excuse for almost absolutely every absence. I was off school for something like two months in my 6th Form year visiting the UK with my family and whilst the school wasn’t happy about it, there wasn’t anything they could do about it because my parents came to the school (the Nuclear Option of Parental Notes) and more or less said to the headmaster “FYI, we’re going to the UK for a trip, so Martini will be missing about two months of school. See you when we get back!”
In 7th Form (final year of High School) we could write our own absence notes, which sounds like a dangerous and silly thing to do, but the reality is that anyone who was in 7th Form was clearly either going to University or otherwise Going To Do Something and we were generally pretty mature and not the sort of people to just bunk off class because we couldn’t be bothered with it.
That’s what happened to me too. I always started school right after Labor Day until the 8th grade. Then they moved it back to the last week of August. As students we weren’t too happy. It’s even worse now. I think most schools & universities start by Aug 20. It takes a lot of fun out of summer for the kids. :o It really messes up college students that depend on summer jobs to pay their tuition costs. That’s two critical weeks (2 paychecks) of full time work gone.
In Illinois our school year is 180 days. We have people who want to start after Labor Day, end at least a week before Memorial Day, get a week of spring break, two weeks at Christmas, and all the little holidays. We try to tell them they can’t get 180 days in that way but they don’t like to hear it (both teachers and parents). Surveys show that ending time seems to be the most important, so we start before Labor Day and went to the 22nd (for students) this December. We should be out the week before Memorial Day.
With my school, it depends. Basically a parent’s note is okay for up to a certain number of absences, and, after that, a doctor’s note is required.
And unexcused absence means you were truant. Heck, I wound up accidentally getting a teacher fired because I didn’t know that. The police officer scared me into admitting that the teacher had unofficially encouraged us to go see Paul Tibbets who was appearing in Branson during a school day.
