Sick at School

 

Sick at School

                Students and staff alike are discouraged from staying home when they are sick. This has been true for the decades that I have been a part of the system. The discouragement stems from the method through which schools are funded and the punitive enforcement policies schools enact to protect their funding. The major downside to this policy is that more people get sick and fall behind in their learning. The band-aid solution to this (alleviating the problem without changing the system) is simple in both concept and implementation.

                Students, parents, and staff dread being sick. The illness itself may only take a person out of the classroom for a couple days, but the road to educational recovery can take weeks, months, or even years. This is far longer than the handful of days that is the standard allowance.

As a teacher, it takes more time to make the lesson plan for the substitute (exacerbated by being ill in the first place) than to skip some extra work hours and teach the lesson while sick. The teacher shortage further pressures teachers to deliver their own lessons as the quality of substitute is less reliable than it once was. Teachers will then teach at a substandard level (though in their mind better than a placeholder without content knowledge) and potentially spread their illness to other students. This is not what the teacher wants, and they will justify attending school by their certainty that their ailment is not contagious. The way this works shows how the martyr mentality is pervasive in all aspects of a teacher’s profession.

                The student and parent have an even more difficult road to travel than the teacher. Students are expected to not fall behind when they are sick. How can anyone expect a sick person without expertise to teach themselves multiple subjects in one day with no help? This expectation is unreasonable and yet exists throughout the educational system. When the students come back, hopefully only missing a day or two of school, they are expected to know where the class is (albeit easier now with online and transparent Learning Management Systems (LMSs)…think Canvas) and be able to pick up where they left off. What really happens is a student has a double work load for the days or week they are given to turn in their make-up work, but since they didn’t learn the concepts they missed, they either get less credit or copy and miss the learning, and so fall further behind.

                The side effect for all people who get sick during the school year is exhaustion. When this happens without respite, this causes the people to be more susceptible to another illness. This compounds the stress and lack of learning to amplify any other barriers to learning or fosters teacher burnout. There is a way to prevent most of this from happening, and it’s simpler than you think.

                Schools are generally paid based on how many children are in attendance throughout the day. If this is changed to being paid regularly based on the active roster then schools would be able to focus on learning and allow students who need time to recover to take that time. If the students are sick and in communication with their teachers, the schools would still be paid for that student, and they could use the time needed to recover physically and academically.

                With the current system, extra attention is paid by the district and schools to ensure that students are physically on campus. The bar is set at having the butts in seats. The goal is learning, but it is implicitly stated that if they are in the room, we’ve done our job for the day. Those who have working in lower-middle class schools especially are aware of this fact. This policy, whether explicit or implicit, is an additional stressor on the educators and tends to add to teacher dissatisfaction. The goal for teachers is for students to be in a healthy learning environment but are left with so many unhealthy students that their job becomes more difficult. If this were not true, the students who need the most help or miss the most school could make use of resources and alternatives, such as tutoring and materials for activities, because there would be money to provide those recovery services.

There are many students who would benefit from this option, and it would apply to students who get occasionally ill, as well. Without the focus on attendance enforcement, the resources of the school and community could be redirected to addressing gaps in learning and the needs of students in attendance.

                With a simple switch in the way student presence contributes to school budgets, students could be free to be ill and administrators would be able to divert resources to provide more meaningful learning opportunities. While many solutions are complicated, some are simple and have a ripple effect throughout the system.

It remains important to check up on the students who are regularly truant to ensure their welfare, but these families need to not be punished for the students not going to school. Many students in high school help out their families or work. They will probably not complete high school, and if they are caught could start the prison cycle that will prevent their future success and contributions to their family. This sad story can be avoided if students being present for every class is not the basis for a school’s funding. We need to stop penalizing students who are predominantly low-income by criminalizing truancy. This would also save a lot of money and resources for the penal system and social services provided through the school. This change would, ironically, allow more social services to operate effectively in more schools. Students can receive resources to enable them to attend class or obtain the skills necessary for them to succeed on their own.

This change from truant to taxpayer has its own set of positive unintended consequences. All of this stems from a desire to take care of the students’ health. This small change has an expansive impact that allows for greater learning, lower stress, more effective resource utilization in social and educational services, and more people contributing actively into the economy. Especially now that cold and flu season has arrived at the schools again, it is important to remember that recovery takes time and schools need to be properly funded. This is one way we can do so that is simple, effective, and financially efficient.