10 Reasons Parents Send Sick Kids to School


Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin | in Background Check

Parents don’t want their kids to miss any more school than necessary, whether it’s due to illness or any other reason. Schools are motivated to operate the same way, both for educational and for financial reasons. There are times, however, when a child is just too sick to attend. A student may be contagious, or feeling poorly, or both. Allergies are more common than ever before, and symptoms are often similar to illnesses that would otherwise keep children home. However, when a campus seems to be full of students who are wheezing and coughing and honking like geese, questions arise as to what the parents might have been thinking when they sent such obviously sick children off to contaminate the world.

Below are a few of the more common instances in which kids, who look like they should be knocking  at Death’s door, instead show up at school.

  1. Unaware – Unfortunately, not all parents pay enough attention to how their kids are doing, and these people may not even be aware of whether their children are attending school or not. They aren’t likely to notice if Junior’s temperature was up that morning.
  2. Just an Allergy? – Allergy-prone students are often sent to school when they have a cold, because the symptoms match, and the parents don’t realize that this cough and runny nose has a virus as a source.
  3. No Help – Parents may feel they can’t afford to take time off work, and they may not have any immediate child-care options available, so they cross their fingers, send the kids to school, and hope for the best.
  4. Home Worse – For any number of reasons, the parents may believe that the home environment is a worse place for their child to be than at school.
  5. “Free” Health Care – More often than anyone should be comfortable with, parents, of all economic persuasions, utilize educational institutions as free health-care, thinking that the school will give their child access to a health-care professional (true) and free medicine (false).
  6. Kids Faking It – When the family dog is unavailable for homework ingestion, a student may resort to faking an illness after arriving at school, in order to avoid a class that they are not prepared for.
  7. Sudden Onset – Sometimes a virus or flu can sweep so quickly through a student body that the old term “dropping like flies” comes to mind. Kids start the day feeling fine, but then it’s a constant parade to the school clinics and lavatories.
  8. Crying Wolf – Some kids are always trying to get out of school by claiming that they are sick. Parents can begin to suspect that this is the case every time the child says they are sick and end up sending their child to school when they really are ill.
  9. Mis-diagnosis – Parents aren’t doctors, but they are usually the primary care-givers. If a parent thinks a child is healthy enough to go to school, then that’s what happens.
  10.  Bad Manners – Unfortunately, there are people who just don’t care if their kid infects the whole state. This isn’t the norm, but it happens surprisingly often.

Sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it’s not and sometimes it is not what it seems. Those are your basic three categories for why there are ‘sick’ kids in the schools.

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