There's a snow day in our schools today, and for once I'm glad of it. My son got sent home yesterday morning -- I won't say sent home sick, because he's got a cold like everybody else in the Northeast and on my "sick enough to stay home" scale, that's on the side of not sick enough, mister. The school nurse sorta agreed, but said the teacher had sent him down as being unusually grumpy, and since he doesn't pop into the nurse's office enough to be labeled a school-avoider, she'd give him a break. "There's a snow day tomorrow," she assured me, "so he can have two days home."
For a while there, it looked like the snow day was not going to materialize, and I was going to have to decide whether to send him back the day after he was sent home. But now I have another chance to give him the kind of fantastically boring day that I hope makes school look good by comparison.
I'm still not convinced that illness was the cause of him wanting to ditch out during second period, but it sure appears to be a good excuse, as long as you don't overuse it. Seems like nurses were stricter about this sort of thing back in the dark ages when I went to school.
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Photo by Terri Mauro
And then there is NJ, where if you didn’t get your child the mandatory flu shot (what the heck?!) your child was kicked out of school starting Jan 15, whether your child was sick or not. Come back in April. Makes no sense to me because a lot of the kids that were vaccinated got sick, and they were allowed to stay in school. But the healthy kids without the vaccine were told to stay out for MONTHS.
This is the flu – the same flu that we all went to school with for our entire school career.