With the talk of reopening schools in spite of rising new cases of COVID, I was wondering how laws requiring school attendance will work if schools reopen but a significant number of parents decide not to send their kids back to school. Are there generally any exceptions to the laws for keeping kids out of school during an epidemic, and will they work if the state government declares schools to be open? I’m sure that if there are widespread reopenings some parents will opt to homeschool and others will claim to homeschool (the difficulty of doing that varies from state to state), but is that the only general option?
I’m trying to just get the factual information on truancy laws and how they’ve applied in similar circumstances in the past, I don’t really want to go to IMHO or GD territory about it.
Typically, if a parent (or other legal guardian) says the kid is excused, they’re excused. I’ve seen some much more frivolous cases (like a student who missed the first three weeks for her birthday party), and there wasn’t really anything we could do about it.
The student is still responsible for the work done, however, and will fail if they don’t eventually do it.
FWIW with child visitation rights (of separated parents) the enforcement part of it has been emergency only during COVID19 in NY. Other then that the party who has legal rights of visitation but being denied is told that the police are not doing anything about that right now and to contact their lawyer if they want to do anything about it, so it is not being enforced.
That may be where you live but it’s not universally true. In NYS, school districts decide which absences are excused and which are not - if a parent doesn’t explain the absence , it’s not excused but if the explanation is a vacation or a trip to the mall, that won’t be excused either. Too many consecutive absences or too many total absences results in a call to CPS.
As for the OP, in NY once the schools are open, your options really are to send the kid to school or to homeschool. How well those laws can be enforced is another story and I don’t think there were any similar circumstances in the past- compulsory education started after the 1918 flu and I think typically when there were outbreaks of polio or some other disease the schools closed.
Maybe an ancillary question–How does one prove participation in the education process. At least going to school a student–even an indifferent one attends and can be evaluated and cajoled to some kind of progress. But in a virtual environment, that’s much more difficult. My son was a teacher this year and parents would leave nannies and the like to ensure the work was done and the student attended. The Nanny wouldn’t do these things and the parents would blame my son for being a lousy teacher because he was failing the kids because in many cases they literally never logged into class and turned in nothing. The administration of course backed the parents paying tuition. In a world where virtual school is the norm, how do you enforce attendance? I know someone is going to say, “Lots of kids are home schooled”, but that is a conscious choice and commitment by the parent. Sadly there are a lot of parents who either don’t care about education or feel they don’t have time to worry about it.
That’s the problem, there aren’t similar circumstances in the recent past (say last 30 years). At least not country wide.
We are in new territory.
A friend of mine recently remarked that historically public schools have prevented children from attending schools that were not up to date on their vaccinations for certain diseases, yet certain districts are now going to require kids to come to school without a vaccine for a deadly virus.
I highly doubt, parents that keep their children home from school will be prosecuted for truancy.
Historically, schools have prevented children from attending school if they were not up to date on vaccines that actually existed- there is no vaccine for COVID 19 yet.They didn’t prevent/excuse kids from attending before polio vaccine was invented.
I actually work for a cyber charter school and can answer this.
We absolutely track attendance and make truancy referrals to CYS as necessary. In PA (with minor fluctuation between counties), schools decide which absences are considered excused/unexcused. Typically a parent note can excuse no more than ten days per academic year, and not beyond three consecutive days. Any absences longer than 3 days, or any absence at all beyond the first ten days absent will require a medical note. Parents are able to request “educational field trips” ahead of time if they anticipate a vacation, but they need to be pre-approved.
We do not require live attendance to classes (but strongly encourage that as it is beneficial). We monitor attendance by a percentage of work completed. Our students can work at varying paces, but need to progress and show about 5% of lesson/class completion each week. Students can work at an accelerated pace and that will be taken into account as well. We often have students that finish the semester work a few weeks early, and in that case, we turn off their attendance monitoring.
In the case of the brick and mortar schools, (my daughter attends brick and mortar school), I think they all differed on how they monitored attendance during the COVID shut down. Even at my school, we were unable to mandate any work beyond what was initially scheduled for March 13, the last day of operational schools in PA. It sounds like you son was an unfortunate victim of no one knowing what the hell they were doing when the schools shut down, but I sympathize with his plight against what sounds like a Karen parent, and an overly catering/litigious fearful administration.