re: TN Lawrence County School System will no longer accept doctor's note for absences

Some special children are much more susceptible to getting colds and fever. In the past a child could go to school with a fever and sneezing. Nowadays the teacher sends the child to the school nurse and if the child has a fever of 100 or close to 100 they get sent home, not to return to school for at least 24 hours.

Normal children should not be missing many days unless they just have an unusually bad run of luck catching colds.

1st son, hardly missed any days no issues.

2nd son developed Myasthenia gravis his freshman year and caused him to miss a ton of school. He was able to keep up be he is very smart and he could access his school work online. This is at the very beginning of online availability pre COVID. We would have to go round and round with the School Board because he did not have enough seat time in a classroom to pass the grade even though he had straight As. It would work out, but we would have to go through it each year, like they had no idea we just did this the previous year,

3rd son, missed as many days as was allowable each school year. More due to injuries from sports and him being lazy.

I

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Shrug. Reddit is melting down over this, but having been a manager, I can tell you with 100% certainty these mother frickers are bullshitting.

They’ll skip work and then pay the urgent care co pay for a note for a get out of jail free card.

Your arse better be admitted to the hospital or dead.

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You clearly managed a fast food shift or something of similar importance. I don't want anyone potentially contagious coming into the office. If you're constantly taking off and not getting your work done, that issue will resolve itself.

For them to handle it in this manner it tells me attendance must be tied to funding. I could be wrong though.

Doctors have gotten very liberal with doctors note dates of absence since Covid. Good on the school system for calling it out and not accepting mediocrity

What's wrong with setting an attendance policy that says if you miss more than X number of days you do not move up to the next grade.

No need to get truancy officers involved and waste the courts time.

I'm sure Dr's also get tired of providing alibis as well.

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Strep throat X two or three throughout the year plus the flu might do it. My son got strep throat three times in a year when he was in the second grade. What about the major surgery? With that being said, I’m sure there are kids who missed that many days or more who didn’t have a doctors excuse. Find another way. Let’s not target kids who really get sick.

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Just wait until a high school kid gets mono.

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Doctors have gotten very liberal with doctors note dates of absence since Covid. Good on the school system for calling it out and not accepting mediocrity

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This isn’t them suddenly being concerned with the students. This is about funding. Yet again American school systems prove they don’t care about the students, just the funding.

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Or, manage your people. If the work is getting done, and they are using days they were offered by the company, who gives a rat's arse?

Your job doesn't care about you this much (business owners are different story), why do you care about it so much?

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I don't, but it costs medicaid millions of dollars a year in each state for parents that are too lazy to get their kid to school or won't make the kid go. Many of the "visits" aren't even visits. They get billed out in return for an excuse. Cost the system untold amounts of money.

I give my employees 20-25 days of PTO to use how they want. Holidays or days I choose to close not included. If they exceed that, they just don't get paid unless they've had serious health issues.

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Do you have stats on this? Google isn't giving me much and I'm curious about it

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Hard to quantify because it's insurance fraud many times. They cracked down on it in Arkansas before COVID. Providers were required to testify in person in excessive cases. It wasn't unusual for a kid to have 30+ "excused absences" with a note from a provider. It was disproportionately high in the Medicaid population. According to someone I know that was over that, they had over 100k fewer excused absences the first full year. Once providers and parents started getting subpoenaed, shite started dropping fast. Then things got lax again with COVID until they stopped the telemed visits. My wife was guilty with our youngest daughter. I caught her getting excuses written from my pediatric practitioner and nixed that. She's lucky the judge was one of her clients and despite my best efforts let her slide. shite like this are why these kids don't want to work or show up for work daily. They aren't in the habit of having to do shite you don't want to do. it's a cost burden to the health system and it does them no favors.


The TN school system's policy is ridiculous though. Get too strict and you'll have to shut school down every year during outbreaks. They need to use some common sense and let kids with legit illness attend virtually when they can. They should still get their state money.