Get a Doctor's Note or 30 Days in Jail

[CseMgr1]

My son called me today, very concerned about a letter he has received from our local school authorities. My granddaughter is a typical six-year-old and is attending public Kindergarten. Well, as kids do, they come in contact with other sick kids and wind up getting sick themselves. He told me that she had recently contracted a strep infection. My daughter-in-law took her to her Pediatrician for treatment and obtained a excuse, which covered her absence for two days. However, my granddaughter remained sick beyond those two days and wound up missing five altogether. My daughter-in-law did not take her back to the Pediatrician to get another note to cover the remaining three days, because my son did not have the money to pay for another office visit. Now the authorities are threatening to have him jailed, if my granddaughter misses one more day of school without a doctor's excuse. I know that the schools are trying to enforce the truancy laws, but think it is rather unrealistic for them to expect a parent to haul their kid to the doctor in order to get an excuse every time they wake up throwing up. What do you think? Do those of you who work in Pediatricians' offices see a lot of visits for this reason?

[VivaLasViejas, ASN, RN]

High schools are just freakin' unbelievable these days. They'll do just about anything to keep a kid in school when he's not learning anything, when he's being bullied, when he's two-and-a-half credits behind in graduation requirements and they schedule THREE non-credit study halls in the same semester, when he gets in trouble just for holding hands with his girlfriend, when the people surrounding him are terrible influences on him........I finally got a bellyful of all this last month and took my 17-year-old out of school entirely. I was going to get him into Job Corps or at the very least send him through a GED program after the first of the year; in the meantime, I wanted him to go to work for my SIL and develop something of a work ethic before going on with his education.

Well, it wasn't three days into the new year before I started getting calls from the school, threatening to sic the law on me for not sending my son to school. Where, I asked, were they when he got the s*** kicked out of him in PE class last fall? Where was their concern when he finally got enough of being picked on and lit into the kid who'd been harassing him since eighth grade? (He got suspended for that one.) And what in heaven's name did they do to help him when he wasn't learning a damned thing and his GPA was hovering around 0.5??!!

Now, I know as well as anyone that their main concern was the money they were losing on him when his butt wasn't in the seat, but it still infuriated me that they dared take the decision-making for MY son out of my hands when they didn't give two cents for him the entire time he attended that high school. Fortunately for all concerned, I was able to enroll him in a GED class that's held on campus at my old community college; of COURSE I want him to get an education, but as I told the school authorities, he wasn't getting one at that school, unless you counted learning how to feel like a world-class loser, or how to cop a bad attitude, or how to stay alive when he had four or five bullies threatening him every day.:angryfire :angryfire :angryfire

[NRSKarenRN, BSN, RN]

No calls here...the High School DO NOT want parents calling re child out sick. I aways wind up signing my son's absence notes "NRSKarenRN" and use medicalease. Just the opposite of your experience...