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