Parenting 101: Making sure your kids attend school every day

November 10, 2:32 PMMontgomery County Wise Parenting ExaminerCarol Josel

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Absence takes its toll

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If the swine flu attacks, sure, you keep your child home from school. Ditto for bad colds, strep throats, stomach viruses, and all the other ailments that can lay a child low. Family emergencies and loss, too. Otherwise, no excuses.

When school is in session, and classmates and teachers are pouring into the building, your child needs to be among them. Every day.

Being too tired, bored, or unprepared doesn’t cut it as far as excuses go.

Nor do visits to grandparents, relatives, Disney World, and other such venues. Save those outings for school holidays and summer vacation.

Writing for Newsweek, John P. McCormick in “Where Are the Parents?” said: “Many parents behave as though the school exists for their child alone; a particularly annoying sub-species of the self-absorbed pulls kids out of class for family vacations and asks teachers to prepare a week’s worth of lessons, presumably to be administered by the ski patrol.”

Missed lectures, discussions, reviews, debates, guest speakers, films, labs, field trips . . . Failing to attend deprives your child of all that’s being taught and leads to gaps in learning. Grades suffer, everybody suffers, and you end up sending the message that education is not that important to you.

Say the editors of the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s You’re Part of the Equation, Too, “Absenteeism affects more than just the child. The teacher must struggle to fit extra time into a full schedule to help the student catch up. And the parent may not notice the loss of learning until it’s too late to do much about it. And since learning is a continuing, connected process, if a student misses Tuesday’s lesson, Wednesday’s lesson may not make much sense . . . And if a student habitually misses days or weeks, is it even possible to catch up? . . . To compound the problem, the habitually absent student is not only going to miss the sequence of learning, but is going to miss the acceptance of and interchange with his or her peers.”

You get the point: there’s just no substitute for being there. And parents are the driving force behind good attendance, so . . .

Make school your top priority and get involved in school life any way you can. If work keeps you from volunteering during the day, chaperone an evening event, such as a dance. Plus, many schools alternate between day and evening meetings of their parent-teacher associations, so join in. As for field trips, sign up—even if it means having to take a day off from work. Meanwhile, try to never miss a Parent Night and always make it to parent-teacher conferences/meetings.

And remember:

1. Set a reasonable bedtime for your child and stick to it. Teens need about 9-1/2 hours of sleep every night to perform well. Anything less and you run the risk that he/she won’t want to get up and go to school, and, once there, won’t be very alert.

2. Besides a good night’s sleep, a healthy diet helps ward off infections and maintain energy levels. Make breakfast happen every morning.

3. Schedule all dentist, orthodontist, and routine doctor appointments for after-school hours.

4. Don’t buy the line that your child is too tired to go to school—even if it’s because of that big science test he/she isn’t ready for. Going to school every day is his/her job and is as important as your own.

5. Serve as a role model, going to work even when exhausted, behind on your to-do list, or coming down with the sniffles.

6. If your child is truly too sick to go to school, make sure he/she calls a classmate(s) to gather all textbooks, worksheets and assignments. If the child is a neighbor, these can probably be dropped off at your home; otherwise ask that they be left on the main office counter for you to pick up.

     Most schools will do the gathering for you, but only after three days of school have been missed.

7. Once feeling a bit better, get him/her started on all that collected school work.

Have no doubt; the kids with the best attendance make the best grades.  Help make sure that your child is one of them.

For more information: www.schoolwisebooks.com