Get Out of School

The start of school is always rough. Not only because it’s boring or tiring, but because of the constant tickle in everyone’s throat. September always brings a common cold with it. All it takes is one person deciding to tough it out when they’re sick, and all of a sudden, the whole school comes down with something. This could all be avoided if we stay home when we get sick, so why don’t we?

The day you stay home from Stuyvesant, you need to fill out an absence form. The Stuyvesant website claims this serves the same purpose as a note from your parents, but teachers will ask for notes anyway. The morning you decide to stay home, you have to put your sick mind to the test to write out emails to all of your teachers, making sure you don’t write the foreign language teacher an email in English. The next morning, when you’re still sick, you realize you’d need a doctor’s note to stay home for two days in a row. So you drag yourself to school, have all your teachers sign the excused absence form, and assure them that, yes, you are feeling better.

The procedures at Stuyvesant are long and excessive. Every extra bit of work to stay home feels like an excuse to go to school, and even if a student does stay home, there’s always work at school that they’re missing. Homework and tests always seem to pile up when kids are sick, and once someone returns, they get two days to submit the work they missed and are supposed to stay on top of the rest of the new work they’re getting as well. So instead, students resolve to not stay home when sick because no one wants to get left behind in school. 

Stuyvesant has always been infamous for its high-pressure environment. In my case, I’ve always thought that I was rather unaffected by it, or maybe that it was more tame than I was expecting, but the prevalence of sick kids who forced themselves to go to school at Stuyvesant changed my mind. At the return of school, everyone’s coughing, but they’re still in school. So eventually, you think that no matter what, you should stay in school too. When it comes down to it, being sick at Stuyvesant feels like it’s your fault and a problem that you have to deal with alone. So, students come to school and work through their illnesses, struggling by themselves. 

Students should never be presented with the choice between health and school. Not only is going in sick worse for their wellbeing, but it’s also worse for the wellbeing of those around them. High school students get around two to four colds a year, mainly during the colder months in fall and winter. As many students know from personal experience, colds pass around the most during this time when students return to school. Schools are breeding grounds for germs at these times, like the cold or the flu, from water fountains to cafeterias. Of course, the best thing to do in this situation is always to stay home when you’re sick, but Stuyvesant isn’t doing everything in its power to support students doing this.

However, with this year’s fall, the common cold isn’t the only thing students have to worry about: COVID-19 is also on the watchlist. Much like the pattern for common viruses, the return of students has brought with it a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases among school-aged children. Cases among kids aged five to 12 increased from 32.64 to 89.09 cases per 100,000 people from September 2 to September 23 this year, and for 13- to 17-year-olds, it increased from 39.97 to 118.06. These increases are double to triple the city-wide average. Through the worst of the pandemic, schools learned how important it was for students to stay home if they were sick to stop the spread of COVID-19. We still see this implemented this year when it comes to COVID-19, with students having to stay home for five days if they test positive. However, staying home isn’t encouraged for anything you don’t think is COVID-19. So, despite our pandemic experience, we may be doomed to needlessly sharp peaks in sickness on graphs every fall. If we want to avoid this, schools need to show students that staying home is an option. 

When a student decides to take a sick day, they implicitly decide to take on a bunch of work, including classwork and homework for each day missed. However, sick days should be days when someone feels incapable of working. To do this, Stuyvesant and other schools need to ease students’ burdens of staying home. Stuyvesant should start by encouraging students to take more sick days during flu season or when a cold is going around. They should also make sure resources are easy to access for students who have missed classes. This can include teachers using Google Classroom or reminding people of tutoring hours over the morning announcements. Finally, Stuyvesant should make it easier to actually stay home on the day you’re sick by reducing the amount of paperwork students have to deal with and making sure teachers aren’t allowed to assign anything extra. On the students’ end, the excused absence form should be the only thing they need to turn in. All of these solutions, even if implemented separately, would begin to tackle the issue of illness in our school. Getting sick is not a crime, so staying home shouldn’t be a punishment. 

However, making it easier to be absent could lead to misuse of this ability. The environment in Stuyvesant heavily emphasizes studying and even skipping so that students can study more. Some students might choose to skip a test so that they can get more time to prepare than their peers. If a student wants to try to excuse this absence using the more lax attendance policy, they would have to hand in an excused absence form. Then their parents should still have to corroborate their story, similar to the excused absence form that the school uses now. This should prevent misuse of the attendance policy while also letting kids stay home. 

A student’s job at school is to learn to the best of their ability, which is impossible if they’re interrupted by headaches, chills, coughs, and sneezes. Schools need to improve their procedures to help students improve their school experiences. That way, when you’re sick, the best option for everyone involved is to get out of school.