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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At least in my neck of the woods, we said for 1.5 years that going to school (as in physically going to a building) wasn't necessary, so it's unsurprising that people took that to heart.[/quote]

I agree that this is part of it, plus sickness, whether kids are sick more often or there is more awareness about keeping sick kids home. Regardless, the messaging addressing both issues simultaneously minimized the importance of in-person education and emphasized the need to keep sick kids home. Is it any wonder that people internalized those messages? [/quote]

The thing about keeping sick kids home for longer is an issue. People are now keeping a kid with a cold home for two weeks until every last sniffle is gone. You can't do that and have anything resembling a normal school year. And it's especially damaging because it's younger kids who tend to circulate these cold viruses more often -- there are kids in K and 1st who have cold symptoms for most of the year because they are still in the phase of just catching everything and building immunity. As they get older, they won't get so many colds.

But K and 1st are critical years for literacy. Missing two weeks of K to an illness might be the difference between finishing the year with basic reading skills or not. It's a big deal.

But I don't know if this is even counting toward the chronic absentee numbers, since the absences for illness are excused in our district (I do think you need a doctors note after three consecutive days out, but it's not hard to get a doctors note saying a kid has still has a cold or an ear infection or something). So this might actually be a problem on top of chronic absenteeism with unexcused absences, where parents are just keeping kids home for no reason. Which is frightening.[/quote]

Parents should be working with their children at home.    Two weeks is no big deal and not going to hurt anything. [/quote]

You can "should" parents all you want. They aren't.

If we had chronic absenteeism and rising test scores, declining juvenile crime, and improving behavior in schools, I feel like people would care a lot less about the chronic absenteeism. The same kids who aren't in school are also not learning anything and engaging in criminal activity, and when they ARE in schools, they are disrupting classrooms and making it harder for teachers to teach the kids who show up every day.[/quote]

This is true, and it's also a reason why some higher performing students are now staying home more often, especially at the secondary level. They're tech savvy enough to know how to access the material that's online using whatever platform their district has, and they can submit everything online. I don't really blame them for not wanting to be in a classroom trying to learn alongside peers who are being disruptive. [/quote]

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