Yeah, that sort of slipped in out of nowhere somewhere along the thread. Just roll with it.
I have to say, if I did take my kid out for a week, or two weeks, I’d try to make it now, at the end of the school year. They’ve been doing absolutely nothing productive for two weeks, and we’ve still got another to go. :rolleyes:
Why? If kids and parents are individuals, they can decide for themselves if this warning applies to them and their circumstances–they know way, way more than the school could possibly know about what the absence was for, what was gained by it, what the alternatives are. The school doesn’t know if that two weeks was to visit grandma on her deathbed or because mom was binge watching Netflix and kept over-sleeping.
Are parents really so delicate that a totally consequence-free “Hey, this will affect learning, make sure you are aware” is a trauma that they should not be unfairly subjected to? Should schools really feel like they have to err on the side of caution here?
I didn’t say “dire”. I said that it can have an effect. That effect may be worth it, considering what you gain. But you should think about it and be aware of this.
And the kids whose parents pull them out for 10 days every year are not immune to those other disruptions, along with tons of others you mentioned. So adding additional stressors to that seems like something one should consider carefully.
Again and again and again, I’m not saying it’s never okay to pull a kid out for a non-medical reason. But some parents are really naive about how big of an impact these absences can have over time and it’s reasonable for schools to make sure that parents do understand that even just a couple days every month is a significant thing.
Back in my day, parents who took their kids out of school for vacations at any time other than summer or the Christmas or spring break got a really hard time of it from the administration and one family was even told those days would NOT be counted as excused absences, but that was back in the 60’s and 70’s when parents actually took the teacher’s side when they were told their child had misbehaved. One of the best and brightest girls in our class had so many absences junior year that she was warned missing one more day would result in her repeating junior year…and she had highly influential parents. Since she tended to feel very entitled anyway, the whole class was on Deanna Watch to see if she showed up every day. Pretty much a 50/50 split on which way we wanted things to go for her! My own kids never quite got to the written warning stage during their troubled high school days, but I did get a verbal warning. No idea how many days that was, though…I’ve pretty much blocked those years out.
Well, the school wagging its finger at the parents will definitely solve that problem.
I’m going to assume the intervention you have in mind is closer to social services than truant officer, but how many parents – particularly parents at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale – are going to make that assumption on receiving such a letter?
I have to agree. Manda Jo, you’re an excellent educator and I really respect you as a poster and genuinely awesome human being, but this is one of those times where you’ve got blinders on because of your position. (It happens to all of us sooner or later!) I appreciate hearing from the education/administration perspective why they’re doing it like this, but from the parent perspective, it’s nothing but destructive. What you’re saying you’re trying to accomplish is good and admirable, but this is the exact wrong way to go about it.
“Dear Parent/Guardian,”
This is tone deaf. This is the opposite of individualized instruction or intervention. This is a form letter that doesn’t even include my *name *on it. There’s no WAY I’m going to read this letter as an expression of sincere concern for the personal struggles potentially happening in my household and an offer of individualized assistance in an effort to relieve me of my burdens and ensure that my child gets the best education possible. I’m going to read it as one more burden, a threat from someone who doesn’t know or care what my family is dealing with, one more thing I have to figure out if I can fix or safely ignore for the moment. (I’m probably going to think it’s motivated by money (the school loses money when my kid isn’t there), because my biggest problem is money, so whenever another problem comes up, my mind fits money into the problem somehow.)
“if your child continues to miss this amount of school in the future, it will certainly inhibit their success,”
This makes me think, “If you don’t even know my name, how “certain” can you be that *my *child’s success will be inhibited? How well do you know *my *child? How DARE you claim to know my child and what she can handle better than I do? Fuck you.”
“I am confident that this pattern of absences will not continue.”
Fuck. You. You. Cocksucking. Motherfucking. Arrogant. Condescending. Asshole. Guess what? We’re going to the zoo next Tuesday. Just because. And maybe the Art Institute. Maybe we’ll fly to DC and go wander the Smithsonian and actually learn something besides how to take a bullshit standardized test. Goddammit, maybe I really should look into homeschooling, because this bullshit make me so fucking angry I could punch you in the throat next time I see you at drop off.
Three sentences, and I’m unable to listen to another thing you say for the rest of the school year (or next school year, in this instance.) This sets up an adversarial relationship between my child’s educators and me. It does *not *get us on the same side with the same goals in support of my child. It makes me afraid and/or disdainful and blindingly angry, not enlightened or empowered.
Your goals are laudable, and make sense, and thank you for sharing them. This particular letter does the inverse of helping us meet those goals, however.
I did say “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.” I certainly would have written a different letter.
And I’m not sure that everyone would react poorly to that. You would, I would, because we have a strong “fuck the man” streak. But a lot of people don’t. A lot of people need something to wave at their boyfriend when he keeps taking the car overnight so they don’t have a way to get the kids to school, or to wave at grandma when she says she’ll take the kids to school (because mom goes to work at 5 AM) but doesn’t, or to wave at non-custodial dad because he has the kid Tuesday night/Wednesday morning and keeps them out for “fun day” every other week and tells them not to tell. I’ve seen all of those things.
But yeah, that’s not the letter I would send. My point is simply that I think some people feel like the school has no business commenting in any way on excessive absences. The OP wasn’t wondering about the tone, he was wondering when it was appropriate for the school to comment at all. And my answer to that is that the school should intervene in some form or fashion earlier rather than later. Do you disagree with that?
A form letter is for the very first stage. It’s for mild flags. You send a form letter because the alternative is not addressing the problem at all, because there are too many kids to spend the time calling each one personally. Then you intervene with the (hopefully) smaller number where the form letter was not enough.
I do not disagree with that.
I disagree with that.
In elementary school, teachers have 20-30 “homeroom” students they are, in effect, the case managers and advocates for. (For that matter, if they don’t have the time to deal with it, they need to bring the school’s social worker on board, who is the literal case manager for the entire student body.) At the worst Chicago Public School my kids ever attended (and it was a really really bad one) truancy was about 25%. So that’s fewer than 10 families that need to be contacted. That’s less than two a night not including weekends. That’s not unmanageable. A teacher who can’t manage that needs an inservice on time management. (Actually, I would prefer an email, a preference which my daughter’s teacher asked us to specify at the Open House at the beginning of the year. He and I email small concerns back and forth quite frequently, which takes minimal time and can be done at any time of the day or night without having to get us both free at the same moment.)
In high school, teachers should be talking to the students who are struggling with attendance personally, during office hours, study hall or after school. Heck, if you’re just at the “first stage…mild flags,” it takes 20 seconds to tap them on the shoulder as they’re gathering their books after class and say, “Hey, I noticed you’ve missed a lot of class lately and I’m worried. What’s up?” That’s your first step, not contacting the parents. If you need to move beyond the first step, you need a more time intensive, personalized, and detailed approach anyhow.
If nothing else, make a Macro and put the parent’s actual name in the letter and detail a few dates of absence in the text. Make me at least *think *you remember my kid as separate and distinct from the others. 
I’m thinking of a situation where the parents have a single, shitty, car, that they’re stuck with, and if something goes wrong with it, or if they have to budget the gas this week, well, no one’s gonna dock their pay if the kid misses school. But you do get a letter saying you’re an unfit parent and maybe you’ll have your kid taken away because you have a single, shitty, car. Somehow I don’t see that prompting the parent to call the school and find out about alternative transportation options.
Moreover, if Boyfriend cared, he wouldn’t keep the car overnight in the first place. If Non-custodial Dad gave half a shit about the kid’s education, he already wouldn’t be keeping the kid out of school all the time. The only thing less useful than waving a letter at someone is waving a letter at someone when you stand to get in trouble over whatever it is and they don’t.
One, we don’t know what the full intervention plan is at this particular school, or when various levels kick in. There’s no reason to assume that this letter is the beginning and the end of everything. Two, it’s always easy to stand outside someone else’s job and decide that adding some other task wouldn’t take that much time, wouldn’t be that big of a deal–but it’s rarely that simple in practice. Which, again, isn’t to say there isn’t an intervention plan in place, or that there shouldn’t be–there should. But I wouldn’t dismiss such as no big deal, not a lot of time or effort, simple and mindless. It’s not. It’s work and it’s a pain in the ass and it’s scary and time consuming and complicated.
Again, not really defending the tone of the letter. And I never said it should be the ONLY thing schools did. But it never threatened to take away the kids–it just said “Hey, school is important”. Some people seriously don’t know that. They do value their kids education in an abstract sense, but they really don’t think of attendance as a tremendous priority. They think that if their kid is well behaved when they are in class and not causing any trouble, then they are doing well, and that missing 2-3 days a months–or a couple weeks on either side of Winter Break–is irrelevant. The dad that keeps his kid home to play videogames on “his” day isn’t ignoring education, he just doesn’t realize one day a week is a big deal.
Even when the case is something like a single shitty car, a sense of how important attendance is can motivate a parent to swallow their pride and call someone to see if they can take the kid, or rearrange their schedule at work, or something. You seem to assume that anyone keeping their kid out of school is either a shitty parent or has absolutely no other choice. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes it’s just a matter of not prioritizing, and an early, low-key intervention can help. If it doesn’t, then you escalate. Hopefully in a constructive, positive way.
I think the appropriateness of when to comment on absences depends on the consequences of the absences. The middle and high schools I went to would hold you back if you exceeded 4 unexcused absences every quarter of the school year (you’d “just” fail the quarter if for one you exceeded the limit), so in a case like that one would hope a warning would arrive no later than say absence 11 because I’m fairly certain parents deliberately keeping you out of school for something fun like a vacation weren’t considered excused, just noted so you didn’t get in-school suspension for skipping on your own volition.
BV
I don’t know where that post came from. I blame the cat.
I think the theory is that for a certain amount of people “we gotta get Junior to school first, or they are going to send another of those damn letters” actually does work.
My company is full of smart professionals, but life happens and every pay period people manage to fail to submit their time sheets. To encourage people to be timely, they send out this supremely embarrassing public email to senior management listing everyone that didn’t get their time card in. From Bob in the mailroom to top of of the hierarchy- if your time sheet is late, everyone is going to know it.
I was late exactly once. Slight shaming totally works.
OP returns after a lengthy absence! I expect a nastygram from SDMB management shortly.
The letter didn’t mention the “v” word at all, other than to include it in a list of *approved *reasons for absence, specifically family vacations with prior approval, which we got.
Public school in an affluent neighborhood. I’m not the stewing type.
Well, part of the reason I rolled my eyes at the letter is that I’m required (requested?) to provide justification for every absence. The school gets that information, so they know if it’s because of a personal illness or a vacation or whatever else was on their list of approved reasons. I don’t know if they track that information, but if not, why am I giving it to them?
We’re talking elementary school here, kids aren’t cutting classes without parental approval and if, say, my wife and I miscommunicate on who’s going to call the school to report an absence, we get a phone call within minutes of school starting asking where they are. There’s no such thing as an unexcused absence at this stage, in the sense of it’s never going to be the kids’ fault that they didn’t show up.
At some point my wife went in to talk to the teachers about this vacation – do you think the teachers at any point tried to talk us out of it? Did they say, “By the way, if your kid gets sick for a few days on top of this then it’s going to prompt a letter at the end of the year chastising you for taking this vacation that we are, right now, not objecting to?” Did they refer us to the school leadership? We jump through these hoops and then the school nags us well after the fact because, what, they can’t possibly know what all of these absences were for? Despite having policies in place designed to capture just that information?
It’s all a bit silly. For the record, the threshold is at least 11. That’s how many days my 2nd grader missed. 5 for the vacation (whoever said dying grandmother wasn’t that far off), 3 for another trip that was entirely unnecessary but we knew we’d never do it if we waited, and then 3 for illness.
So look at the note, say “that doesn’t apply in our circumstances” and move on. Schools have limited resources to work with, and they have better uses for their time than being your personal attendance concierge. If you spend your days being offended by form letters, it’s going to be quite a slog.
Wow, is that really the tone I’ve put off in this thread? That I’m slogging through days of being offended because I don’t get a personal attendance concierge?
If so, oops! Because that’s not at all an accurate reflection of reality.
I think that the letter is about the cumulative effect, not any particular absence. It’s quite possible to have a situation where every absence, when looked at in isolation, is reasonable, but the pattern as a whole is potentially problematic.
Have you never worked with a person like this? They miss work all the time, and each individual absence makes sense–illness, family emergency, whatever–but the overall pattern begins to take a toll on their productivity and the productivity of their team? And after a while you start to wonder if they really are just horribly unlucky, or if maybe their threshold for “personal illness” or “family emergency” is a little low? It’s really, really hard to call anyone out on any particular case, but the over all pattern begins to seem like maybe they just don’t prioritize work that much, and don’t realize the impact it’s having that they are gone so much?
You seem to feel that the letter itself is a punishment. From what you’ve quoted, it’s rude in tone, but it’s less a chastisement and more a “This should not be a typical year for your kid, because if it is, it will have an impact on learning”. You are upset they didn’t warn you–but this IS the warning. And they may err on the side of over-warning, because it’s better to over-warn than to let a kid slip through the cracks. And the problem wasn’t the vacation, it was the vacation plus the other 5 days plus the illness.
I mean, if the teachers had said to your wife “Well, the school really recommends against excessive absences, so if you take this vacation and then your child misses a couple more days for a cold or something, they will probably send you a letter suggesting that’s a flag there might be a problem in the future”, would you have cancelled the trip?
And, again, I think that’s a pretty reasonable threshold. 11 days is a lot to miss. One year, because of a family emergency (the five days), not a big deal. But a kid missing 10+ days every year for all of elementary school would very likely be meaningfully less skilled heading into middle school than one who did not. If the school failed to note the 11 days as being at all unusual, it might give you (or some less savvy parent) the impression that 11 days is routine, that most kids miss that much, that it’s a reasonable total, so you continue to pull your kids out for a couple weeks a year + illness absences. Then, when the school says something, it’s all “Well, you didn’t say anything before”.
I’m not sure what power the school has to punish me beyond sternly worded letters anyway.
And to be clear, that was not an exaggeration – I had letter in hand as I wrote the OP.
The first trip we took for family reasons, no, although I would have appreciated the heads up. The 2nd trip that wasn’t really necessary, I don’t know – we struggled with that one. The threat of a form letter alone probably wouldn’t have shifted the balance, but I’ll note that the form letter says that missing 11 days “will certainly inhibit their success.” If they could back that certainty up with either a personal assessment of my daughter’s potential and/or some actual science showing that missing 11 days in elementary school has a measurable effect on future success, we most certainly would have reconsidered.
Or it could encourage me to send my kids to school even when they’re sick. I might say, “Well you’re not that sick, and Uncle Leo’s not doing so well. Better go to school today so that if we have to drive out to Idaho for his funeral we don’t get nagged later for taking too many days off.”
Or maybe not 
I appreciate your feedback, it’s exactly what I was looking for when I started this thread. I still think the letter is a bit douchey the way it’s written, but I think you’re right that 10-12 is probably a reasonable threshold. This year was certainly an anomaly for us but my perspective is of course clouded by that knowledge.
In most (all?) states you can be fined or jailed. In a few, you might see your kid put into foster care while the court sorts out whether you’ll be allowed to keep custody of your kids. Is this very likely in an affluent private school? Not nearly so much as is it in a poor public school. More likely, and especially if the child’s learning does suffer, or his/her absences are deemed disruptive to the rest of the class, you will simply be asked to take your child out of the private school.
Chronic truancy is not something to be taken lightly.
Here’s how one state (South Carolina) defines various levels of truancy:
Your state probably has its own rules and definitions, which may or may not apply to private schools as well as public.
Is this a woosh?