The thing is....I realize people get sick. People can catch germs anywhere: grocery store, library, school, out in public anywhere really. However, I volunteer relatively regularly at my daughter's school and the number of children sent to school sick is high. The school policy is such that a child should stay home if he/she has a fever or any other visible signs of illness outside of minor sniffles. Apparently, I am one of the few parents who actually follows this rule. Each time I have been on that campus and in my daughter's classroom in particular there have been kids with green snot literally dripping out their nose. Last Thursday there was a child sooo sick in her class that when I came home I told my husband that I knew, KNEW, our daughter would be sick within days. (This child sits next to my daughter and was picking his green snot and then reaching into the community supplies that my daughter then used as well). She was sick by Saturday.
My frustration with this is two-fold. First, parents! What the hell are you doing sending your sick kids to school? Second, school officials! Why the hell don't/won't you send them home? I resent the fact that I go to great lengths to make sure I don't send a contagious kid to school and yet I feel like every time I send my healthy child to school I am sending her into a petri dish.
1 comment:
I think parents feel so much pressure to be at their job that they don't feel like they have any other choice but to send their child to school sick. As a former working parent, yeah I did it once or twice when he was a "little" sick but never full-blown. Why? I had no one to watch him and the stress of my job was just to much to endure missing a day (and at one job the scorn of the single ladies....).
I see kids at school now with the dried snotty nose or telling me "I was a little warm today but my mother sent me to school" and I don't get too close but I do feel sympathy. But it doesn't make it fair to you who is trying to keep 3 kids healthy!
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