Undereducated Decisions by the School System

   The following letter was sent to the Springfield News-Leader and the local ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliates, and is gaining interest for publication in other areas of the country. It has been edited slightly for internet viewing.

    I have a story that you might be interested in hearing about...

    My name is Charles, I am the 35 year-old father of Michael, 6, who attends first grade at one of our fine Springfield Public Schools. During his kindergarten year we kept him out of school for a total of a week on separate scattered days when he was sick (as excused absences), like any responsible parent would do. Near the end of the kindergarten school year, we were able to finance and get the time off of work to take a trip to Greece to visit my wife's family. We spoke to the teacher and the principal about this trip, and they said that it would be a good, healthy trip for him to take and gave it their blessing. He missed another 7 days of school for the trip, again excused. In short, there were NO unexcused absences on his record for the year.

    In July we received a letter from the office of the county prosecutor stating that our child had missed too much school the prior year and that, "if you value your child's education you will see to it that they attend school," and that if we wanted to avoid prosecution we had to attend a meeting then keep our child in school more regularly. We went to the meeting (in August) at Central High School to protest this stupidity. We DO NOT need to be told what is healthy for our child, and we do very much value his education. Both of us are in A-students in college, and my wife teaches at Drury University. We are the last people they need to be telling the value of education.

    Anyhow, through the meeting, the crowd sat calmly and listened to what the boss had to say, then we protested. First one parent, then another, then again another. The entire day blew up in county prosecutor Darrell Moore's face after calling in hundreds of parents who had no place being preached to about their child's school attendance. Like us, most of them were parents of children who, for one reason or another, had excused absences...but the school district AND prosecutor's office said they had no way of discerning excused from unexcused absences, which is why we ALL got the letter. I say BS - I'm a database developer and can work that problem out in one afternoon. The meeting broke up, very few people signed their "attendance contract," and we all thought the matter was over...

    Back to the current matter at hand - his first grade year. Michael has a history of having seasonal allergy problems to the point where it almost always causes earaches or sinus infections with fever. We were called one day a couple of weeks ago by the school nurse who informed us that Michael had a fever and we needed to come pick him up. The school is not "allowed" to keep children in the school when they have a fever, so we picked him up. He awoke the next morning again with a fever. We called the school nurse, who told us to keep him home until his fever broke. We took him to the doctor for his second round of anitbiotics the same day, and tried taking him back to school the next day. His fever returned, so we were once again called to pick him up from school early. This scenario stretches on and off for a week until finally this week his fever broke (hopefully for good) and has been in school all week. We had voiced our concern over the absence problem and they (the school) told us that the whole Darrell Moore issue had been a misunderstanding and that we were not to worry about any of that.

    Skip to today and we receive a letter in the mail from the school principal stating that Michael's attendance has once again fallen way below the "school average" and that we needed to carefully watch his attendance. I called the principal and talked to her about the letter, and she told me that she was required to send the letter, so I called the school board and spoke to the district attendance officer (truant officer in old fashioned terms).

    My conversation started out with him on a pretty good note. He acted as though he was concerned about the situation and understood what I was asking. All I had wanted to know is what my legal rights are in the situation and at what point do they make the determination to prosecute. He said that there were four steps to this program, and I had received the first - a letter from the school. The second step is a call from the truancy office, the third a home visit from the truancy office, then the last step, prosecution. I asked what could be done to avoid this, and that's where the conversation went south. He told me to keep the kid in school, and had little else to offer. He said that the case would be handled individually when it gets to that point, but I don't have time to deal with their moronic system. The question boils down to just how am I supposed to keep a kid in school who is running a fever and is sent home BY the school? It's a catch-22 scenario, and now I fear further action from the prosecutor's office if my son ends up with the flu or a stomach virus and misses an entire week of school. I have some string hanging over my head that I'll end up jailed by this dictator if the school nurse decides my kid can't be in school.

    This whole thing has turned into some fiasco, and we are seriously considering moving away to get out of this stupidity. I have a child who is genuinely afraid his parents will end up in jail over this and blames himself (at six years old, mind you), and a wife who is concerned that the system here will try to take the boy away from us because the school nurse sent him home. I feel like we're stuck in some twilight zone system we don't belong in, and don't know what to do.

    I can understand a system for prosecuting parents who don't care and let their kids run wild, but they should have some sense and keep the excused absences for first graders running a fever out of this! This whole thing has gone WAY overboard, and it's time to take some action to get all of it fixed, but I don't know who to go to.

    I tell you what this rounds down to - money. The schools are subsidized if they show good attendance records, and it seems to me that the district is doing everything wise or unwise to ensure those numbers are met. They don't care about the children, they care about their numbers and money. Call me wrong, but that's the case as I see it.

    I just thought you might like to hear about this.