Submitted 11 hours ago by 
lydiaschoch@mastodon.social@mastodon.social to bookstodon@fedigroups.social
There’s a scene in a Ramona Quimby novel where Ramona is sent home from school in the 1950s or 1960s because she was sick.
When I was school aged in the 1990s and 2000s, students who missed too many days were punished. One would still generally go to school with, say, a cough or mild fever unless you were ill enough to see a doctor or be hospitalized.
Older people of Mastodon, do you know when and why this changed?
nirak@lincolnite.net 10 hours ago @lydiaschoch I was sent home sick in the 80's/90's, but I do think they started calling parents if we missed too many days
This was mostly in southern California
JMMaok@mastodon.online 10 hours ago I would be cautious drawing too many conclusions from a fiction book where that may have been a plot device.
That said, in the US I would look to No Child Left Behind. It tied school funding to student achievement and resulted in a lot more measurement. It is common for schools to be funded by days students attend, so that would also be a factor.
wil@beige.party 10 hours ago @lydiaschoch I don't know at what point this was instituted but I was a chronic truant as an adolescent (uin the 70s) and learned that the reason the school was so upset was because they got money for each child only when the child showed up.
joyce@hcommons.social 11 hours ago I don't know why, but I'm guessing that in the 1950s the school could be relatively certain the child's mother would be home to care for them if they were sent home. In the 90s and 00s, that would not be true.
clew@ecoevo.social 10 hours ago Also, if no one was home, it wasn’t legally the schools fault. Nobody’s fault legally, afaik.
edebill@wandering.shop 11 hours ago @lydiaschoch @bookstodon same in Texas in the 80s and 90s. School funding was tied to students attending a minimum number of days. They’d lose funding if you missed too many so they’d force you to make them up.
mortaine@dice.camp 11 hours ago Probably around the time women became expected to work full time and take care of the household. We fought for the right to work, and got the right to overwork.
I went to school in the 80s and early 90s. You stayed home if you were sick enough, but if you stayed home too much, your mom (usually) might struggle to get child care for you, and the school would be penalized financially because you didn't attend class.
not2b@sfba.social@sfba.social 11 hours ago @lydiaschoch @bookstodon Part of it was the expectation back then that there was a mother at home, not two parents at work.
diazona@techhub.social 11 hours ago @lydiaschoch @bookstodon FWIW I went to school in the 90s and 2000s and I do not remember a punishment for too many sick days ever being a thing at my school. So it probably varied by region and district too.
lydiaschoch@mastodon.social@mastodon.social 11 hours ago @diazona @bookstodon I’m sure you’re right about that, then. Maybe I just happened to end up at schools that were really strict about it.
pomegranate_stew@kind.social 10 hours ago @lydiaschoch @diazona @bookstodon
Our state passed a law in the 1990s where they started sending “your child *needs* to be in school” notes if they missed more than 5 days and if the kid missed 20 days they’d take the parents to court.
I can’t imagine what the parents of chronically ill children went through.
EricWayneS@mstdn.social 11 hours ago @lydiaschoch
No idea, but to be honest I learned how to forge my mothers penmanship and by seventh grade I wrote all of my own notes to the school
lydiaschoch@mastodon.social@mastodon.social 11 hours ago To clarify, I think the sick day policy of Ramona’s era was so much more sensible and wish it had still been around when I was a kid.
We spread so many germs around at school. Some winters more than 1/3 of the total student body would miss school certain days because of how many different illnesses were spreading everywhere. 🤒
It would have been so much healthier for the sick ones to just stay home to do assignments and keep our germs to ourselves.
SomeVeganCheeseIsOk@mastodon.social 11 hours ago @lydiaschoch @bookstodon I think it varies by school, honestly.
lydiaschoch@mastodon.social@mastodon.social 11 hours ago @SomeVeganCheeseIsOk @bookstodon That would make sense.
@lydiaschoch @bookstodon Because schooling became more about metrics and less about learning.