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    Joined: Apr 2014
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    Originally Posted by Dude
    Originally Posted by puffin
    Originally Posted by blackcat
    If a student here has a certain number of unexcused absences, like 10 or 14, or tardies (if a child is even one minute late they mark it as a tardy) the school calls CPS and there is a truancy case. I think once a kid hits 14 absences, they have to bring in doctor's notes. Parents have access to an online acct. and I was looking at DS's page yesterday, and they have documented every absence and the reason for it (sick, medical appt., unexcused, etc). There is even a graph showing the percentage of sick days vs. unexcused, etc.

    I wonder if this could have to do with that....they are trying to make a case that there are too many unexcused absences? I don't know, just thought I'd throw that out there


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    Are you serious? That is crazy. Here it would take a lot more than that (like 6 months non attendance) to get a truancy case taken though if my child were late to school every day the school social worker might get involved.

    I know kids who habitually missed 30+ days of school each year, and no truancy case was generated, despite this wording in the law:

    "A student shall be considered habitually absent or habitually tardy when either condition continues to exist after all reasonable efforts by any school personnel, truancy officer, or other law enforcement personnel have failed to correct the condition after the fifth unexcused absence or fifth unexcused occurrence of being tardy within any school semester."

    Policy and practice don't often match.
    A possible explanation for much weirdness by school personnel is that they have school improvement or school wide professional development goals which involve meeting some arbitrary benchmark for attendance, on-time attendance, parent participation, communicating, outreach to parents, school-community partnerships, etc. It's the end if the school year, and they're running out of time to meet their goals, which might be tied to merit pay for the principal or teachers union members, avoiding takeover by the state, etc.


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    if it's not compulsory and it's not a life changing event I'd definitely take my child's feelings and thoughts into consideration. That includes my 7 year old, my 5 year old and even my 3 year old. In fact, even with life changing events I'd be likely to ask them and consider that into the mix too.

    Flip if I had left Aiden at the K level in the gifted school he was at before we pulled him out I'm sure by now my marriage would be over, Aiden and I would both be on medication and he on suicide watch. He was 5 and my only regret about listening to him was that I didn't listen sooner - like an entire year sooner! We could have skipped so much anguish, angst and emotional and psychological turmoil. All just by asking what he wanted. *sigh*

    We homeschool/unschool now and my older two boys get to choose their own goals, and set their own work schedules. They suggest/veto project and outing suggestions and they definitely chose their own sports and activity options.


    Mom to 3 gorgeous boys: Aiden (8), Nathan (7) and Dylan (4)
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    I wasn't kidding about the calls to CPS. I know of 2 families where CPS got involved. One of them involved a single mom who had a first grader and twin infants. She was sometimes a couple minutes late with drop-off because of juggling all the kids by herself, and once it got to about 15 tardies, CPS actually came to the school and there was a meeting.
    One day my kids arrived at school literally seconds (maybe 5 seconds?) after the bell rang. The reason they were late was because someone locked the back door earlier than usual, so they had to walk around the building. The kids were sent to the office and marked tardy, and it's in the records.

    I've become paranoid and if I can't get my kids out the door (with DD's ADHD and DS's organizational impairments this is often difficult), I start to panic a bit, thinking about mounting tardies. Sometimes they are marked tardy when I know I dropped them off before the bell rang. Parents aren't allowed into the school (unless they go to the office and sign in with ID), so if my kids get distracted or wander, they are marked tardy, and then I could get reported to CPS.

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    Illinois has a very strict policy on absences too. If I'm not mistaken, it's first 5 or 6 absences and you get a warning letter and once you hit 10 (or is it 9?) ... and that's total for BOTH semesters, the school is supposed to notify the truancy office and you're being watched like a hawk and from then on have to bring doctor's notes and any non-health related absence has to be approved by the school administrator. DS5.10 when he was still enrolled had major absences. He'd go to school for couple days, get sick for a week, then school for couple days, then sick again. Knowing the policy and how much he'd get sick, I had it written in his emergency medical plan (which was mainly to cover his allergy but we included this too) that it was expected he would be sick often and that the school would NOT require us to produce any doctor notes (he tends to catch even more bugs when we visit doctor offices) to not compromise his immunity even further and our doctor signed off on it and I had the school sign off on it before he even started attending. And of course, two or three weeks after the school started (this was last fall), we got the warning letter in the mail, so I marched in, with a copy of our emergency health plan, asked to talk to the principal, and made him aware of the agreement we had that no action would be taken and I have to say that they did follow it from then on. By Thanksgiving when we pulled him out to homeschool, he had about 25 absences I think?
    ... and totally off topic, but hes not been sick ONCE since we pulled him out in November! He had sniffles for about 2 days but no high fevers, frequent trips to the ER, anything like that. So homeschooling clearly has many more advantages aside to tailored education plans smile

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    Our school district (or possibly our state) is also very strict about total # of absences and calling CPS.

    FWIW, the principal's reason is sounding a lot like what happened with friends or our family who were part-time homeschooling in elementary - the school really didn't *want* them part-time homeschooling, and eventually pressured them into having to either enroll full-time or withdraw and homeschool full-time. When the school was putting pressure on the family to make their decision, they used reasons such as this - not being available to fully participate socially (from the school's point of view). Perhaps the principal's only concern is floodgates opening with lots of other parents opting their kids out of field trips, but I'm wary that there might be something more behind it in terms of finding excuses for why part-time homeschooling doesn't work. If you're *not* getting that vibe and the school is completely behind your decision and happy with it, then totally ignore this reply!

    Best wishes,

    polarbear

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    One of the concerns schools have about part-time homeschooling (and this even applies to private schools) is that they will be held accountable for the results of instruction that is largely out of their control. It is easy to view this as controlling behavior in the sense of infringing on privacy rights, but you also have to think about it from the standpoint of consequences that the school and school personnel take for situations over which they have no influence. Any student who is on the books in the state count as being enrolled at a school affects their attendance, graduation, and state testing figures, which feed into their school and district performance figures, which affect Race to the Top funds, state receivership/supervision status of the district, NCLB accountability numbers, etc. Every public school administrator I know (and a few private school admins, too) has at least one directly-observed horror story about a homeschooled student who was not receiving adequate instruction, or was nominally homeschooled as a cover for some truly neglectful/abusive family situation. Granted, there is a fair amount of selection bias, as the successful homeschooling families are probably less likely to wash back up on the public school shores than the poorly-homeschooling families. But the point is, their anecdotal experience causes them to fear that a student being educated outside of their own (presumably) watchful eyes is not going to learn, and then the school will be punished for it when mandated testing time rolls around.

    I have had more than one administrator say to me in surprise, "You homeschool? But you're so normal!" (Little do they know!)


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    Originally Posted by Irena
    Originally Posted by somewhereonearth
    Principal Cuddly Crocodile approached me because she was "very concerned" that DS7 is not going on the field trip. I thanked her for her thorough follow thru and her attention to this. But I simply repeated the reasons that DS has already told her about not wanting to go on the trip. I then asked her, what's all the kerfuffle about? Are they going to the Jim Jones Nature Center? (Blank stare.) ...

    Then the principal approached DH (Mr. Terse - he doesn't use any more words than he ever has to use. He is linguistically efficient.) He just stated, "I find you and your staff to be offensive. I will not discuss the matter any further. Thank you."

    Oh my gosh, I am dying laughing! The Jim jones Nature Center! (Loved HK's Kool Aid comment ealier too - laughed so much ) Where are the parents like you at my DS's school!?!

    :-)

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    Originally Posted by aquinas
    Somewhereonearth, as an aside, I think our husbands would get along. DH, a lawyer, goes from polite and terse to an ungodly firestorm of argument-decimating verbal ripostes in the blink of an eye. People think I'm the bad cop until they meet his game face. He leaves no survivors.

    Sounds like they would be best buddies. Of course, my DH being so terse, wouldn't have too much to say to your husband, or to anyone else.

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    Originally Posted by DeeDee
    Somewhere, sheesh.

    Is this a private school or public? This seems unusual if it's a public, but some private schools do assume they can control their "culture" and "product" to a pretty great extent.

    Charter school. Non profit with founders who are, honestly, rather cultish.

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    Originally Posted by nicoledad
    If this school is so bad, why send him their period?

    It actually works well for DS. This school is, hands down, the best public school in the area. There are some things that I quite like about the school apart from the ill fitting academics. And having worked in public and private schools for a long time, I find this behavior to be odd, but not so odd. Public schools have a lot of incompetent people working in them. I knew that going in to the game.

    I think the specials that are offered at this school are good. The student population at the school is perfect for us - extremely diverse with a very large immigrant population. I like my DS hanging out with a lot of the kids from his school.

    Of course this can all change on a dime.

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