I missed about three weeks straight in my junior year when my dad died; we had to go to Ohio for the funeral, go to Texas and pack up his stuff and head back to California with it. (The funny part was my finding his porn stash, which horrified me at the time…a seventeen-year-old girl, ya know? I mean, I knew he was a man and all, but still!)
I don’t remember any trouble at all from the school. I’m sure if there had been any my mom would have been right there tearing them a new one. I don’t remember what happened with schoolwork and make up work and all, I was pretty numb, but as I graduated on time I must have gotten through that okay.
I’m not sure if it is still the case, but in the Boston Public School system, an excessive number of absences would lead to a lowered grade. So, you could be doing “A” work but end up with a “C” if you missed too many days.
I’m thinking that since the reason they are away is on frickin’ MSNBC, they know that a) they aren’t faking it and b) their parents are taking care of them (the Obamas have been accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think they’ve ever had “bad parent” thrown at them even by teabaggers)
If the sprog misses school, I still have to write a note. I generally e-mail the school secretary and his teacher to let them know he’ll be absent, but the note is a CYA measure. If the sprog has a doctor’s or dentist’s appointment, I always get a note from the office, even if it’s just for a routine checkup. The principal has questioned parents who take their kids out of school for too many undocumented “routine” appointments, and I just don’t need the headache.
Pennsylvania has a statewide policy of allowing five days of pre-approved absence for “educational” purposes, which is intended for high school kids’ college visits, but which is extended to all students. It’s not a guarantee that the absence will be excused; for example, if the student is simply going on vacation, it’s unlikely that the absence will be approved as an excused absence unless there are special circumstances.
Parents need to either call or send a signed note.
They can get in major trouble, though, if their kid misses a huge amount of school. I’m not sure the number, but “truancy” is filed through the police if a kid misses tons and tons of school. We have a couple kids per year(out of about 130) that this happens to.
Hey, some parents consider school a “once in awhile” kind of thing.
We had 3 kinds of absences in my public school system:
Excused after the fact. This was for illnesses and stuff. My parents called the office when I was sick to let them know I would be absent. When I returned to school, I had to bring in a note to the attendance office and they put it into the system as excused.
Excused before the fact. This was if you had some event you knew about beforehand. My parents wrote a note and I took it to the attendance office. They gave me a form and I had to take it around to all of my teachers to sign that they had seen it. I participated in a number of honors orchestras and music trips and stuff that usually caused 2-3 absences a year like this. Nobody ever had a problem with it.
Unexcused absences. Like Senior Skip Day. I told my parents about it and said that I didn’t want to go to school that day. My strict, academically-oriented mom, to my everlasting surprise, said I could stay home, but “I’m not writing you a note!” Yeah, Mom, that’s kind of the point.
My younger brother’s high school had an automated system that called the house in the afternoon if he was absent from a class. I was home from college on break one day when I guess he was skipping, because I accidentally intercepted one of these calls. Of course I didn’t say anything to my parents, but I wondered how many other times it had happened.
I thought I posted earlier to this thread, but can’t see my post. I must’ve hit the wrong button.
The local school district will accept a signed note from a parent for an excused absence, as did the school district I attended as a child. They would even accept my say-so for an excused tardy. They were good about that, at least.
Over here you’re expected to phone in. Most schools will phone home if the child doesn’t turn up for morning registration.
All the schools I know really really hate the kids being taken out for holidays; it hardly happens these days. They absolutely ban it for the first two weeks of term.
There is technically the possibility that a parent could be fined or sent to prison if their child truants, but in reality only a couple of unfortunate parents have been ‘made an example of’ and actually convicted.
The schools I went to in the 1990s had fairly lenient absence policies-- you could bring in notes for the front office so that they knew why you were absent, but there wasn’t really any sort of consequence beyond your grades for being absent frequently. Part of this probably had to do with the fact that both were private schools and the high school I went to catered to a lot of wealthy families from all over the world-- there were a few kids who’d be out on a regular basis because of being on the other side of the country or in another country altogether, but most of us were good about being in school unless we were sick or were on a field trip.
The school I work in now has a slightly relaxed policy, and that’s only because they have a secure web portal that the students can access their work assignments from as long as they have an internet connection. If they are out for an acknowledged large number of days, they can still do and turn in their work while they are out, and make up tests and quizzes when they return. They still have to have some sort of documentation as to why they were missing when they are absent.