Grades K and 2, how many absences for the whole school year do you think warrant a letter to the parents that says “if your child continues to miss this amount of school in the future, it will certainly inhibit their success,” and “I am confident that this pattern of absences will not continue?”
1?
I would think that kids that young wouldn’t be skipping school and would be sick or have another legitimate reason to miss school. A letter like that seems too accusatory for a 5 year old.
One not uncommon reason is that whoever in charge doesn’t really take school all that seriously, and so keeps the kid home whenever the adult in question oversleeps, or someone needs to watch the baby, or it’s a pretty day and they want to take the kid to the park. Somehow someone needs to let this parent know that yes, missing even just a day every other week, say, has a meaningful effect on learning. I’d be concerned with any kid who missed more than 10% of class days without any sort of communicated reason.
Another not uncommon reason is that there is a real difficulty, like the parent has no reliable transportation and often the kid is literally stuck at home, or the parent is sick and needs someone to help them, or the child has a health problem. In these cases, there needs to be an intervention and an attempt to find a real, stable solution to the problem rather than just hoping it’s not that big of a deal. Missing a lot of school does hurt learning.
Now, there are better and worse ways to communicate these things, but it’s a reasonable thing for a teacher to want to communicate. A lot of parents really don’t get it.
Plus it uses a bunch of big words. Was there at least a frowny-face sticker to provide some context?
To clarify a little, the nastygram is clearly a form letter, from the principal addressed to Parent/Guardian. The school year ended last week. All absences require parental approval and are supposed to include a reason, which we dutifully provide, but I’m not sure that’s logged anywhere. So, for example, we pulled the kids out of school for a week for a family vacation, but we talked to the teachers in advance and they each got a packet of work to do on the trip. I’m sure these form letters were sent to anyone who’s final number was above X, without anyone looking at details. Which is fine with me, I’m just a little taken aback, figuring their threshold would have been higher. I’m curious what other people think is a reasonable threshold.
“chronic absence” seems to be defined as 10%, which would be about 18 days.
I think that sounds about right. My kids used to miss the two Jewish High Holy days and maybe three or four other days. 18 seems a lot. Even with teachers providing homework over a vacation, the district probably has rules about what’s excused, delequint, and parent approved. We would acknowledge the kids were out (they were cutting class) but it wasn’t always “approved” (doctor’s note or holiday).
In my state, 18 days a year is chronically absent. I believe we treated it as 10 (unexcused) days in a semester causing you to fail the class in high school, but I’m not at all positive, as I didn’t miss much school - besides, that was a long time ago.
From looking at one district’s website in (in Texas), they recommend sending letters after 3 unexcused absences, and have an option to have a SART (school attendance review team) meeting after 5, and should request court action if there are 10 unexcused absences in a six-month period in the same school year. But there’s nothing about excused absences there.
I think a letter home at 10% is more than reasonable. In fact, I’d think 12 absences would be enough to suggest it’s a potential problem. Not as a criticism, but just so that parents are aware. Some really aren’t. And if a kid is missing over two weeks of class time that they didn’t “have” to, that’s too much: it’s a significant loss of instructional time, and completing a “packet” of assignments really doesn’t fix that–kids still come back to class lost and confused about what’s going on. A family vacation has real benefits, and the benefits may outweigh the cost, but if kids are missing 12+ days for such things, that’s not good.
There’s also a big difference between maybe pulling kids out of school for 2-3 weeks one time for a once-in-a-lifetime amazing opportunity for a trip, and parents who pull kids out every single year for 2-3 weeks because they just think of school as the thing you do when nothing else is going on. if you pulled your kids out for a one time chance to do something amazing, you know that, ignore the letter. But if someone is pulling their kids out every year and think it really doesn’t matter, they need to know it does.
Just an edit: “they were not cutting class”
I don’t think you got the letter for number of absences; I think you got it for pulling the kids for a vacation. Most (all?) schools view this as disruptive and unnecessary. You can pull your kids for vacations, but you shouldn’t be surprised that the school frowns on it. And if you plan on pulling your kids out of school for a week every year, you should expect to get one of those letters every year.
Is this a public or private school? That might make a difference WRT the wording of the letter. If it’s a private school they have a little more leeway to tell you that if the kid’s grades start slipping and they think it’s because you’re pulling them out for things like vacations they might not let your enroll them the following year. Granted, this is just a form letter, but if it were to come down to that…say, for example, you take the kid on a two week vacation and they miss some big tests or a huge project that counts for 25% of a grade in one class, they can say 'we warned you about this last year. I’d be willing to bet there’s a “Chronic Absence 2nd Warning” form letter or “Chronic Absence w/ Slipping Grades” form letter or something like that.
Anyways, what I was saying is that if it’s a private school, there’s a school board and they have a procedure to expel students [in this case for missing too many days]. Sending out this letter would be Step 1.
If it’s a public school, it’s just a poorly worded letter and I’d probably just toss it and move on rather than stew over it all summer.
My guess based on the first post was “5 days”. 18 days certainly sounds like a lot of absences to me.
It’s is, that’s almost a month of school.
It’s K-2, so it’s not that you’re missing too much, especially if you’re keeping up with it at home, but it sounds like they just sent the letters to everyone.
I would expect some form of contact like that for a week long vacation, yes. And, if we’re talking about my specific daughter as an individual, I’d do it anyway and use it as a lesson in, “other people have policies and expectations, but we have to make the decisions that are best for us and accept the consequences.” I probably wouldn’t have taken my specific son out for that long, because he found it more difficult to work on his own and reintegrate into school after a prolonged absence. Every kid is different.
I see no reason why a two-week vacation every year should be a problem at all for any kid who is otherwise a serious student and whose parents ensure that they keep up.
I think people are misreading the OP. It was not a matter of a vacation leading explicitly to a note. The vacation was in the fall. At the end of the year, the school sent a “Just so you know, lots of absences can have a meaningful effect on learning, and your kid is at risk of that” to everyone with X or more absences. The OP got a letter because his kids had over X absences, in part because of a week long vacation. We don’t know if they missed other days. The question is, what should “X” be? What is a number of absences that suggests a parent might not understand the importance of attendance?
Earlier, I said 12, but, honestly, if you are talking about a totally consequence-free heads-up letter, I think 10 would be reasonable, and maybe 8. Ten absences in one year because of circumstances is probably no big deal, but 10 one year, 14 the next, 16 the third because the parent just can’t be bothered to get their kid to school has a huge effect, and it’d be better to head that off at the start if at all possible. 10 doesn’t mean there is a problem, but it’s a flag that there might be.
That’s like saying “I see no reason why having a baby at 15 would be a problem at all for any kid who is mature and whose parents are ready, willing, and able to provide all the resources needed to care and support both mother and child until the mother has completed college”. It might be hypothetically true, but it almost never works out that way.
School is not a series of worksheets. Most kids are not capable of “keeping up” with their schoolwork without actual instruction. If what happens over the course of two weeks in a classroom could be replicated with a list of assignments done with minimal parental oversight, the child’s education is severely under-challenging them and needs to be reassessed.
There’s a social cost, as well–missing a lot of school means you feel disconnected and out of touch. This affects learning, because, for example, kids are reluctant to ask questions if they think they will sound stupid because that might have been something that was covered while they were out.
It’s also an undue burden on teachers. You have to come up with alternate ways to construct everything, alternate ways to convey information, and then you have to grade it all. It’s often done poorly (because who has hours and hours to do such a thing for one kid?) and so, again, kids get a bunch of assignments they don’t really understand, or simply never even see half of the curriculum that was covered while they were gone because there’s no easy way to reconstruct it. And parents and kids alike have the impression that all’s well because they “made up the work”, but that doesn’t mean they learned as much as they would have in a class.
I’ve seen lots of kids who missed lots of time for reasons from parents didn’t give a damn to chronic illness to social anxiety to pregnancy. And it effects all of them negatively. Some deal with it better than others, sometimes it’s unavoidable and you just do the best you can, and sometimes what you lose is worth what you gained. But there is an educational cost, and I can’t get upset with a school wanting to make sure parents know that.
Students and their families should be treated as individuals by schools and principles, with individual needs and circumstances, not as living representations of trends. If a kid’s week-long absence has not, in fact, resulted in harm to his or her academic development, there shouldn’t be this grim warning sent out to the parents.
Furthermore, the idea that a single two-week absence can create such dire social consequences for a child seems hysterical to me. Kids shouldn’t be sheltered from such mundane problems as having to get re-acquainted with friends after two weeks.
Kids today have to deal with much more devastating and disrupting events—such as divorces, relocations, financial difficulties, etc. Treating a two-week vacation as some sort of disruptive event is ridiculous.
Part of a parent “ensuring that their kid keeps up” is not taking them out of school for a two-week vacation every year. Yes, it’s possible that a particularly bright student might be able to keep up anyway, but that would be despite the parents’ actions, not because of them. Yes, it’s possible that it might be worth it anyway, depending on the vacation, but missing even one week for a vacation is absolutely going to hurt the kid academically, and the school is 100% correct to tell the parents so.
Where did ‘a two-week vacation’ come from. The OP said a 5 day vacation and then mentioned something about 18 days (but didn’t specifically say that’s how long their kid was out), but I haven’t seen anything about two weeks.
If it is, in fact, 18 days, that’s not two weeks, it’s three and a half. As I said earlier in the thread, that’s not a big deal for a first or second grader, but getting into third or fourth and above and they’re really going to fall behind in math. You can skip a week of vocab and survive but in classes (like math) where each concept builds on what you learned the week before, it’s going to be very difficult when you miss that much school.
On top of that, I don’t know about the other parents out there, but I’m having a hell of a time keeping up with my 9 year old’s math. They teach it very differently now. Staying out of the whole Common Core discussion, I’ve had to go to my kids teach a few times and explain to her that she needs to do a better job teaching this stuff. She can’t just mark it wrong and move on and with a note that says ‘fix this’ since I can’t help her since it makes no sense to me. I majored in math in college but when my kid comes to me and says ‘I don’t understand how to do a tape diagram/dot array/math sentence’…I’m kinda lost.
Now imagine if she wasn’t in school on tape diagram week, two weeks later, she’d really be in trouble, at least right now I can say ‘well just show me exactly what she showed you’ and between that and some googling I can figure it out, but if she wasn’t in class, there’s no way we’d get it (all the googling in the world won’t tell you about how this teacher wants it done vs the tutorial you found on the internet).
And again, I’m still curious if it’s public or private school. If it’s public, I’d just throw away the letter and forget about it*. However, if it’s private school it is basically a warning to let you (or people that are gone more excessively) know that they have a wait list of people that will get perfect attendance awards.
*Assuming it’s for good reasons, if they think it’s for neglect type reasons, that’s different.