Vaporman87 wrote :
At first I thought the title was referring to skipping school without the knowledge of your parents. That is something my friends would do, but I was too honest and afraid to. I’m not sure that I ever faked sickness to stay home from school, but I do know for certain I faked sickness, because I can remember a time that mom wanted to give me medicine, and I foolishly asked if taking medicine when your aren’t sick can hurt you. Talk about being a bad liar. lol
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I did it a few times throughout the years, faked being sick. Felt guilty by the time school was out for the day and thought man I should have gone. Now i'm bored and I can't go do anything because my mom has always said the time your trying to avoid people is the time you will run into everyone you know, and those people will ask if your so sick what are you doing out and about? And I'd feel nervous i'd missed a lot of work or that I missed something my friends would be mad at me about. I was such a weirdo. My mom honestly was weird too though. While she had that policy of oh heck no, you can't leave the house, you won't have me looking like a bad parent to people..she also I'm pretty sure at least one of the times didn't truly believe I didn't feel well but let me stay home anyway. Go figure.
My mom was actually a little TOO lenient in a lot of ways. My son I believe suffers from anxiety. He's never been diagnosed, but he often (too often) wants to stay home from school or goes to the nurse with a belly ache wanting to come home. It's something he's done since hew as in first grade and he's a Freshmen now. There's nothing medically wrong with him, but he also refuses to say it's because he's upset about something. I think he just truly doesn't care for school. Now if he's truly vomiting at home or has other digestive issues or is hacking up a lung, I let him stay home because I can see he's truly sick and it's not worth the hassle of sending him just to get a call to come get him. Where it's harder, is when he's actually at school and randomly he goes to the nurse and TELLS her he threw up. I feel like he's lying at times about this but depending on the school or the nurse you have to pick your battles. In elementary school the majority of the time if a kid says they threw up someones got to come get him. Here in highschool , at least his high school, you can tell the nurse to please actually have him rest a bit and then TRY his hardest to get through the day. This school actually allows them cell phones in certain classes and in the hallways. So i've made my son promise that if he is feeling like he doesn't feel good to talk to ME about it first through text before he goes to the nurse. I can normally talk him down from the ledge.
The reason I request that is that I don't want to look like a jerk in front of the nurse asking her to have him try and stick it out. The reason why I do this, is because he always misses almost the max school days your allowed to use in a year. Sure they claim all the time "keep them home if they are sick!" but then if you actually do that everytime they feel sick you get in trouble. It wasn't AS huge a deal in elementary school. My son missed 15 days last year and they still let him graduate 8th grade because I was diligent about calling each of those days and he wasn't failing any classes and he was a good kind kid. Well behaved. In High School, at least at this one, it's stricter. We have Two Semesters. It's supposed to be something like each semester you can have three unexcused absences before your reported for truancy. Your allowed three absences with a note excuse. If your child is sick and you send them with a signed note from you the next day that you were aware they were absence and why, it's supposed to be excused. That doesn't sound too bad. However, my son was absent three days from Sept to the 21st of December and I got a notice in the mail saying if he had had one more unexcused absence this past semester we would have been in trouble. I was like wait..all three times he was home I wrote a note and he passed it in. That's excused. Not unexcused. Well I checked his absences in the school grade reporting app called Skywardand they were counting the two times this year that he went to the nurse (I don't know if the nurse didn't send him back to class with a note or if the teachers forgot to fix marking him absent for that particular class or what) and the one time he was in his own IEP meeting and the teacher was aware of it but marked him absent anyway.
I was like crap, they count it even you miss just ONE class? I'm pretty sure the nurse is supposed to have the teacher fix those marks but it probably rarely happens. So now i'm like man just text me and try and suck it up. Plus he's struggling with Algebra this year so unless he's dying at home he really can't afford to miss any algebra lessons and reviews. He squeaked by barely passing this semester for that class.
So I for sure played fake sick once or twice, maybe real sick once and probably missed a day or got out early for a dentist appointment once, but I don't think I ever missed more than 5 days the whole school year.
