Many well-behaving and high scoring students flunk their classes just because they didn’t have an excused absence. The highest causes for absences among teens are illness and anxiety/depression. According to Mental Health America 16% to over 30% of students with mental health disorders miss more than 20 days a year. Instead of trying to help, support, and find the cause of these absences, schools tend to punish and penalize students for missing days.
House Bill 145 is a proposal that slightly alters what is considered a valid excuse for an absence. Its highlighted provisions are to “amend a definition related to a student being excused from school; and make technical and conforming changes.” The bill’s sponsors are Representative Carl Albrecht and Senator Michael McKell.
Additions to the definition of a valid excuse include the mental or behavioral health of the child, any parent provided reason (as long as the child has a GPA of 2.0 or higher), and mental or physical illnesses – regardless of whether a doctor’s note is provided or not. Although House Bill 145 does not directly apply to Judge or other private schools in Utah, we think this would be a positive change for Judge to consider. This bill could help lengthen the amount of absences needed to fail and justify reasons for missing, preventing many good students from failing their classes.
As students who have seen the struggles and discourse around Judge’s absence policy, we thought it would be beneficial to make a podcast episode discussing it. In this podcast, we cover our own and other students’ opinions on how the school currently handles absences, what should change, and what would happen if Judge were to implement this bill.
Judge Memorial’s strict absence policy has been a hot topic of debate among students lately, especially as the rules seem to tighten up each year. We decided to dive deep and see what students really have to say.
Senior Isaac Hildebrand thinks the policy is “definitely a little harsh” and fails to take into account many of the “external circumstances” that cause a student to miss school, but he says he sees the motivations and purposes behind Judge’s no-nonsense approach. We asked students what they think should change about the absence policy, or about what the administration should do to help chronically absent students. Here is what some of them had to say.
