Flu can be very quick onset, as well. The one time I caught the flu as an adult, I came into work at 8 feeling fine, and was on death’s door by 9:30. And as other have said, illnesses are contagious long before people start showing symptoms.
Also, some school districts limit the number of allowable absences. Mine made it 10, so one bout of mono and you’re vomiting in secret so the teachers don’t send you home because then you have to go through the trouble of getting a doctors note and appearing before the board to justify your absences.
What do you define as “sick”? I don’t think anyone ever stayed home when they just had a “cold” when I was in school. Sneezing, rhinitis, sore throat, coughing…if that was it, you went to school. You were “sick” if you had a fever, vomiting, or something like chicken-pox.
As mentioned, lots of people can’t afford to take the time off from work to stay home with a sick kid. Lots of those same people also have no insurance, which means they can’t take the kid to the doctor, which means no doctor’s note, which means that absence won’t be excused. Rack up enough unexcused absences and you automatically fail the semester. The cost/benefit analysis for these people clearly leans toward “sniffle your way through the day.”
At one end of the spectrum, to spread the love.
At the other end of the spectrum, to prevent other students from gaining a competitive advantage.
I had malaria for three days - running high fevers in the middle of the day, with the chills and the sweats - before I finally threw up in the morning and mother let me stay home. I was sick for two weeks and lost twenty pounds in that much time. That was the first time I had ever stayed home sick, for anything.
There are a gazilion reasons why - in my case it was my mother had no patience for it, at all.
That was my school district - more than 10 absences per marking period and you automatically fail everything, do not pass go, no appeals to the school board allowed. It actually happened to my brother once.
In my district it’s five absences. It’s not very hard at all for a kid to catch five days worth of bugs over the course of a semester. Schools are germ factories.
That is incredible! As a mom and a teacher, I would be outraged. My daughter has had mono and was out for nearly a month, but she was so weak, and her immune system was so shot, that there was no way I would send her to school.
That would presumably be excused by a doctor’s note, though. I don’t think that the schools are legally allowed to fail you for medically excused absences, provided of course that all the schoolwork gets completed.
It’s unexcused absences they can fail you for. And who wants to drag their kid to the doctor every time they get a cold, even if you DO have insurance?
Same here. And we only got meds to bring down fever–discovering OTC cold meds as an adult was a great revelation!
I’m not sure one way or another, actually - it’s been awhile. I think that you might be right that something like a month’s worth of mono could be excused, since it would otherwise be completely unreasonable. But I’m pretty sure that at least some of my brother’s absences had doctor’s notes, just not all of them.
I know it sucked, but you made me laugh with this story. Do you ever trot it out with her when you want something? "Do you remember that time you made me go to school WHEN I HAD MALARIA?
A friend of mine was always faking sick to lay out of school. His mother got wise to it and wouldn’t believe him no matter what. She sent him to school one day and had to meet the ambulance at the ER – his appendix had burst. These things happen.
I will say this for the school here–if you check them in BEFORE 11:30, they are counted as present (though ineligible for PA awards) for the day. Same thing applies if you check them out AFTER 11:30. I’ve used this to my advantage a number of times–including a time or two when they seemed sick for a little while, then improved, just as you described.
I am a secretary at a high school. I am fed up with parents who knowingly send their feverish/ill student to school. By high school age, the student is very capable of staying home alone, so the parent wouldn’t have to take the time off of work. Many times, the student will come to me and tell me that they had a fever the night before, and also that morning, but they took Tylenol and now they feel fine. WELL OF COURSE YOU DO… YOU TOOK MEDICINE TO SUBDUE THE FEVER. That does NOT make you well, that just makes you feel better!
I understand completely (and have done it with my teenagers often), sending a child to school with a minor cold. If they aren’t sneezing up a storm, or coughing a lung up – their sorry butts are in school. But, if they are feeling that crappy, they aren’t in a frame of mind to be learning, so leave them home for a day.
You can’t avoid all illnesses, and I know that you can feel mildly cruddy and go to school just to have it get worse. There’s nothing you can do for that. It’s a gamble.
As for attendance, yes we have a policy about absences, but common sense is used. If the student is out for too many days in a row (our policy is 2 weeks), we need a doctor’s note. We have several cases of Mono running around right now, and those students stayed home when the disease was first appearing, and now go to school daily. If they are too tired to go to school, the parent calls it in, no problem. Plans are always in place to help the student get on top of the schoolwork.
Schools, generally, are not there to punish students for being ill, but to help them learn how to succeed. I have NEVER seen a student failed because of too many absences due to illness. There are many options available in the public and private schools to get around illness problems.
Timely…
Our twin 7 year olds are in different classes, but go to school together. My daughter looked at me this morning and told me that her tummy felt bad. This seems to be a recurring complaint and we are monitoring it closely, due to meds that she is taking. Both kids got bundled up and were acting fine with no further complaints. They got on the bus at 8AM.
10:30 I get a call from the school, my son threw up all over himself and had a ‘tremendous fever’. We’ve had nothing in the house yet this season, and the kids hadn’t mentioned kids being sick from school. When my wife picked him up, she asked our daughter if she was okay, but she said she was and wanted to stay at school.
Sometimes this comes out of the blue.
Great, now he’s gonna be ‘that kid that puked all over himself in class’.
If my daughter has a tummy ache or runny nose the night before, she’s already making noises about being unable to go to school. By the time morning comes she’s in full blown drama queen mode making it very difficult to be sympathetic or to be able to tell if she’s really sick. So unless she has a temp or is coughing up something brown, she goes to school. Sometimes i get it right and sometimes I get it wrong but I don’t want my kid to grow up to be a weenie about every sniffle or paper cut or skinned knee…god the moaning about paper cuts and skinned knees! but that’s another thread.
This is the first year of pre-school for the eldest of the little raindrops, and our house is now a petri dish. As my wife and I have come to say to each other; “If he only went to school when he was well, he wouldn’t get to go at all.”
*** I work from home, so this is thier first experience to lots of germs since they didn’t go out of the house for daycare, so our case is a little different. But seriously, every week we seem to have at least a new case of the sniffles.