School Attendance Policies That Are Ableist or Classist Hurt Students With Mental Health Issues
And they’re bad for some parents, too.
By Sandy Roffey
My child is a senior in high school. She’s in Advanced Placement classes and works after school, and tries hard at both. But a letter came recently from the head of her “House” (no, not Hufflepuff, they’re split into numbers, One, Two, and Three.) It informed me that my child had been missing from school for four days this semester. These days were marked “Unexcused,” as I didn’t send in a doctor’s note for them, and they could impact her grade, as anything over four absences costs a full credit from her grade in the second semester.
Well, no, I didn’t send in a note.
I didn’t send in a doctor’s note for the day she had a 102 fever and a sore throat, because we’d been to the doctor a few days before, and they told me it was a virus. Since my plan has a very large deductible, I paid $137 for that visit. When the fever flared on Thursday, I didn’t feel the need to bring her back to the doctor for them to say, “Keep giving her Tylenol and fluids.” I also didn’t want to expose everyone in the school to the virus so they’d have to stay home sick, too. I paid the $137, but there are many parents who cannot afford…
