Lori Falce: When to keep your kid home from school

We pay a lot of attention to the shortages of employees at work. The questions arise about what causes the shortages and what exacerbates them during the pandemic.

Is it laziness? Is it burnout? Is it the rise and ebb of covid-19 numbers with various variants taking their turn as the Big Bad? Schools and government offices, even pro sports teams, have had to deal with high numbers of people out for testing positive, being symptomatic or even being sick enough to be hospitalized.

When it comes to kids, the one thing that people harp on is making sure they are back in the building. There are questions (and lawsuits) about masks or not masks. Schools have made policies about whether to get or encourage the vaccines or whether to just draw a line in the sand that says no shots will be given in this building.

What people keep pushing is the idea that parents should be driving the bus when it comes to decisions about their own kids. That and common sense. If you’re sick, stay home. If you’re not, come to school.

But that doesn’t address the issue of what happens when covid absences collide with the letter of the law regarding truancy.

Two weeks ago, I got a letter from my son’s school. He had missed 10.5 days, and I was instructed that any more would result in an attendance hearing.

I’m kind of a stickler about complying with the school’s covid policies because of my kid’s asthma. The 10 days in question included several while waiting for testing (it took two days to arrange) and results (another three days) after an exposure in the fall.

Monday, after we spent the weekend moving to a new house, my son’s allergies flared spectacularly. But because of the letter — and knowing that it was all because of the dust that had been kicked up — I sent him to school. Within an hour, the nurse called me to get him. The nurse and the secretary said I should have disregarded the letter.

Then why send it?

The Pennsylvania Department of Education still requires schools to enforce compulsory attendance, but even on the FAQ page for covid and truancy, the complications of attending school while still isolating amid exposures or symptoms is not really acknowledged. A school district can be forgiven for hewing closer to the rules that are clearly spelled out — the attendance policies — than the ones that are fuzzy and unclear.

But some schools have pushed back hard after remote instruction’s problems, when integrating it as a tool would make attendance and truancy less of an issue.

It also would make it easier to isolate in the event of exposure to illness. Covid might get all the good headlines, but chickenpox and influenza are still out there. We should be encouraging people to stay home when they are sick even when it’s not a pandemic.

Government seems determined to make decisions that aren’t decisions, which sets up problems that don’t have to be problems.

And I know this because of a letter that everyone agrees I should have ignored and a runny nose that was a harbinger of an illness my kid didn’t have.