Anonymous wrote:As a first grade teacher I have to say: missing a week and a half of school for a trip is unfair to your child, your child's teacher and the other students in the class. I have never had any of my families do this.

Do you teach in a title one school?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's hard to believe you are this uninformed in first grade. You also need to plan your vacation in the summer. This is very disruptive to the teacher and your child.

We moved here midway through last year and such a situation has never come up before. Both my husband and I had to travel to Ethiopia for work so we brought our children with us; was it a vacation option surely we would it have planned it at this time.

In the future, arrange for someone to stay with your kids while you are gone.

Anonymous wrote:Report cards note the number of absences and excused absences.

Exactly - pay attention to it and correct any errors. Get notes from doctors and dentists to document the 1-2 hour appointments and they will fall in the excused category.

Anonymous wrote:Some of these replies are utterly ridiculous. I have friends who take their children out of Sidwell Friends for 2 weeks for trips to China, Russia and etc and guess what......... SF is totally ok with that because that child is required to come back and give a report on the cultural and social differences of the places they visited. As one who travels internationally for work and brings here children at least once a year this should be encouraged.

With that said if you are taking your child to North Carolina for a wedding or etc.....may raise some eye brows.

Sidwell Friends doesn't have the type of population DC does. They want to identify and catch at risk kids - and they have to enforce policies uniformly or face lawsuits.

If an extended absence (going to Mongolia to pick up your new adopted child) is important to your family there are ways to do it. For example, you could file papers to homeschool, then re-enroll when you return. Of course if you are OOB or at a charter you would lose your seat in the public school.

Report cards note the number of absences and excused absences.

Also, policy states how school is supposed to respond to each unexcused, non-reported absence. The school should be making calls to you daily w/o knowing why your child was out -that is the only way they can claim it is for concern of the child - if it is weeks later, a childs' welfare is not really in question anymore - either the child is missing from school, or like your child has returned to school.

I got a notice of unexcused absences last month; when I asked for the dates of the absences, it turned out I had email confirmation of excuses for 7 of the 10 days, but the school hadn't registered them on the child's attendance log.
And in case anyone is about to ask why my child has 10 absences (actually it is 13), the school counts your child absent if you miss even one class... So even if you get the earliest appointment with the orthodontist and get to school by 920, you're 'absent' for the day...So a few days here and there with a migraine or virus plus a few ortho appointments can put you in the 'at risk' category

Some of these replies are utterly ridiculous. I have friends who take their children out of Sidwell Friends for 2 weeks for trips to China, Russia and etc and guess what......... SF is totally ok with that because that child is required to come back and give a report on the cultural and social differences of the places they visited. As one who travels internationally for work and brings here children at least once a year this should be encouraged.

With that said if you are taking your child to North Carolina for a wedding or etc.....may raise some eye brows.

Anonymous wrote:Your attitude is the problem. You didn't even know to write the note when your child was sick. If the mandate is to have kids enrolled in school at 5 I have no idea why you would think they shouldn't enforced attendance rules. Work trip or not, your kids should be in school. You need to inform yourself of the rules.

I have a feeling that OP is not the problem that the truancy policies were designed to solve. If OP does her homework and learns how to report correctly, I'd be surprised if much came of this referral.

My school does not do robocalls. When your kid is sick you must email/notify the office, it is not the teacher's job to do that.

I have not recieved any robocalls for absences, though I do recieved them for other things like pta meetings. This must vary by school!

Anonymous wrote:You should have received a robocall for each absence.

Not OP, but the robocalls I get say my child was out, not whether it was marked as excused or unexcused.

As a first grade teacher I have to say: missing a week and a half of school for a trip is unfair to your child, your child's teacher and the other students in the class. I have never had any of my families do this.

Try to dig up any documentation you can about the illnesses.

You should have received a robocall for each absence.