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Dad Pens Facebook Post To Explain Why School Attendance Rules Don’t Apply To His Kids
There are certain facts about public school of which we’re all aware: the lunches are crappy, standardized testing is an unnecessarily big deal, and vacations during school days are marked as unexcused absences, regardless of how cool they are. There’s at least one parent in the world who doesn’t know these things, though, as evidence by a recent response to a school policy form letter that went viral.
Mike Rossi, a Pennsylvania part-time radio personality, recently took his kids on a three-day vacation to watch him fulfill his dream of running the Boston Marathon. Since vacations are unexcused by most school districts — unless it’s a funeral or something, of course — the principal mailed a letter letting them know that the absences would be recorded as unexcused and that an accumulation of unexcused absences could result in a referral to an attendance officer.
Outside of the names and dates, the letter reads like pretty much any other form letter notifying parents of the school’s absence policy. It’s not a threat. It just says, “Hey, a compulsory attendance law exists and this is how it works. Just letting you know in case you plan anymore vacays on school time, mmkay?”
Rossi didn’t take it that way. Rossi told Yahoo Parenting the letter was a “nasty-gram” and posted it to his Facebook page with the most self-congratulatory, eyeroll-inducing response one could muster. He wrote:
Dear Madam Principal,
While I appreciate your concern for our children’s education, I can promise you they learned as much in the five days we were in Boston as they would in an entire year in school.Our children had a once-in-a-lifetime experience, one that can’t be duplicated in a classroom or read in a book.
In the 3 days of school they missed (which consisted of standardized testing that they could take any time) they learned about dedication, commitment, love, perseverance, overcoming adversity, civic pride, patriotism, American history culinary arts and physical education.
