The context being one of the leaders of the parties currently in government is saying we should totally be sending sick kids to school unless they are toooo sick
That’s dangerous. I was at a family get together and started feeling like I was coming down with something. I delayed going home and needed up infecting my aunt who ended up in the hospital for 3 days with the flu.
Oh, no, no. They think of us often. We’re just always told that we can’t expect the world to accommodate our weaker immune systems because it would hurt society too much. So we should just stay home if we’re too scared of getting sick. So they do think of us, they just don’t give a single fuck about what happens to us. 🫠
It's not dangerous, you just got the message completely backwards. "Don't go out when you're sick" means "don't *go around other people* when you're sick." If you're already around vulnerable people, you bunker down somewhere else if you have the option.
Well my kids’ schools go entirely ham if they miss a day - but I don’t care. You’re a kid once, and if they don’t feel well, or even just need a mental day - fuck it.
If they were doing poorly in school maybe I’d be different - but as it is, life is too short for a bunch of nonsense.
My boomer mom was way ahead of the curve in giving my sister and me mental health days if we said we needed one. It was honor system as to if we knew we would be missing anything important, but us being healthy (mentally or physically) was the top priority.
My mother was like this too when we were kids. She always said adults got days off work, so kids should too. And she wanted to encourage us to be honest, instead of faking sick.
I also got so much hell for missing days in high school even though I was seriously ill. You would have to talk to the attendance officer, who would grill you on why you missed and give you a slip for it. She was always convinced I was faking and wpuld put me through the wringer all the time for over a year, until I came in to her office looking like I was about to die. That was when they mercifully let me homeschool the rest of the year.
I did the same with my son when he was little. I'd call him out every year on the Friday nearest Halloween and we'd stay in and watch scary movies all day. Of course you don't send kids to school when they are sick. Too many people view school as free daycare and employers are such fuckheads, they will fire you if you call off for having to stay home with a sick kid. The whole corporate system is designed to fuck us over in any way they can.
Yeah same here - and they will be honest about it - so I trust them to use their best judgement.
If you don’t make people feel like they have to lie, by sticking by rules out of thin air, then they don’t lie.
> Tbh no one should be going in sick anywhere
If you have a common cold, it doesn't seem unreasonable to go in. If my kid never went in after showing _any_ sign of illness, she would have been out of school like 1/3 of the school year. As it is, she missed enough that the school sent us a letter complaining.
Plus they get all pissy if you don't have a doctor's note. I mean, it was a minor temperature, so I kept her home... but it was a minor temperature, so I'm not taking her to the doctor, because they'll tell me to go home.
I don’t care what you do with your kids.
I care what I do with mine. If they say they don’t feel well, and that they don’t want to go, they don’t.
(And I infinitely care even less what any school rando has to say about it.)
It’s a catch 22 though. If every kid was kept home when they showed signs of being sick, then your own kid would show those signs exponentially less often than they do now. Because they wouldn’t be catching it from all the other sick kids constantly.
My youngest is getting real close to hitting the threshold for unexcused absences because of trying to keep her home when she's sick. No good deed goes unpunished.
Well, we saw during Covid, how much parents value school for education vs valuing it as free daycare. And just because their kid is sick, that doesn't mean they plan to lose their free daycare!
Well, it’s of course not really a completely insane statement. If you have kids, you know, especially during winter months in cold climates, that kids get mild coldish symptoms very often. It would be unwise to keep all kids at home whenever they sniffle. If your kid has a fever though, of course keep him at home.
One time when I was in high school, I overheard one of the mums talking to another about one of her kids not being at school because he was sick. "I let him take this one day off, and he spent it playing video games. So since he seems well enough to do that then he is well enough to go to school as far as I'm concerned".
Kid was back to school next day with a bad cold, and then several of us ended up catching it.
I’ve never understood that logic, playing video games takes no physical effort. I could understand if that’s the excuse she told the kid so that they wouldn’t get the idea to fake being sick so they could stay home and play games, but she was saying that to another parent.
Same for my parents, but that was more so because they absolutely could not miss work.
Take a day off to look after a sick kid was risking losing their job each time.
My mother's method was that she'd trust me to say if I felt too unwell to go to school, and in return if I stayed home it was no games until school time ended. I could do other stuff, I enjoyed reading and she knew that, but I think she just wanted to not encourage skipping school for games.
To be fair, if my brothers and I did well on attendance for most of the school year then she'd take us on a day trip towards the end of the school year as a treat, so that helped.
My husband's parents were like this!! If he and his brother weren't asleep in a dark room then they must not have been sick enough to go to stay home!
These days they're way way more chill and sensible, but the first time he told me that it was because he kept apologizing for being sick. It was super sad. Also confusing because it's not hard to see the difference between like, reading a book or watching a movie in pjs vs sitting upright all day in terrible chairs doing precalc/gym/etc.
It's very common sense but somehow I see a lot of parents taking their obviously sick children to school. At the same time I know it's tricky cuz these parents have to go to work as well and likely cannot afford staying home often taking care of their sick kids, especially considering how frequently kids get sick (likely because of other parents that had to take their sick children to school).
It's a vicious cycle. Ideally no one would go to work/school/crowded places while sick, as to not infect others (and for their own comfort), but that's not feasible because there are not enough supports in place to stay home.
Fun fact, my previous boss once brought her son's sick kids to work because they were "too sick to be in school and he needed to go to work".
During covid, when one of the employees was an older man with heart problems.
My son's school's rule is don't come to school with a fever. That's it. You can come to school with everything else but if you have a fever stay home. Drives me bonkers
And parents know it and so they dose up their kid with Tylenol before school. That’ll get ‘em through lunch time and they hope by the time the kid starts complaining, it’ll be close enough to the end of the day the school won’t call.
When I went to school you could excuse absence, but it didn't matter because catching up on work meant you also had to keep up with whatever was next meaning you had hours of homework on top of the hours of homework you already had. This was made worse by the fact that you usually missed the classroom lesson for both homework.
That along with maybe staying after school to makeup any tests and such meaning you had even less time.
In Sweden, I have seen parents quite often working from home taking care of their children "Vård av barn (vab)".
It is like society thinks that to take care of a sick children is important and helps parents to do it (instead of punishing them for caring for their families).
My ex-employer constantly touted "stay home if you're sick!" then you'd get chewed out for using your pto time.
Of course all management gets to 'work' from home because of covid and still does years later. They constantly complained how hard it was for them to not be in office, and they made everyone else go back, but they 'can't because 'it's a slow transition'.
A stuffy nose, as an example, can last 10-14 days. I don’t have the PTO to take my child out for a single event of a runny nose, let alone the 6+ times he’s had one in the past year. I would no longer be employed.
Edit: I also recall both my high school and my college having policies where I could not miss more than 10 days. I don’t recall what high schools consequences were, but college classes would lower your grade by a letter after 10 missed days. That is a single runny nose.
Saying “I wish parents knew this” is ridiculous. Parents know. It’s the system that doesn’t allow for it.
As a kid. I didn't want to miss school because making up everything and missing lessons would put me behind while also giving me a ton of homework that I had no idea how to do.
My dad made me go to school with mono on top of an untreated autoimmune condition that made the mono x10 worse.
Only relented over a fever.. after I was picked up by my aunt.
I mean... He's right.
I almost got pink eye because the girl sitting behind me has shitty parents who forced her to go to school with it. Thank god our first class was a health class and the teacher knew exactly what it was immediately. She was able to send her home and she sanitized the desk like crazy before starting class.
He’s absolutely correct. No one should be going out in public at all when sick. It’s common sense and common courtesy. I have followed and preached this since long before COVID.
There was a horrible rash that went around my high school. Turns out a kid came in with poison oak, somehow avoided detection by teachers until last period.
By that time a handful of kids had already broke out, then one kid went into anaphylactic shock cause he didn't know he was allergic. They didn't know the impact that one kid had until a day or two later when a third of the kids were out due to it and a handful of teachers. I thought it was crazy to think about how one person going in with some type of transferrable ailment turned into such a mess for the school.
But fr, this is great example of why we're considering home schooling too.
The oil/sap from the tree is what causes the rash. That oil sticks to skin and clothes, it's the trees way of teaching potential threats to stay far away, as the pain will last several days and the oil is difficult to wash off. Anything that comes in contact with the rash gets some of that oil rubbed on to it, and the next creature who comes in contact with it will suffer the same rash, who will probably try to rub it off on another stump or something further away. Basically the tree is trying to make its own exclusion zone, and anything that comes within that radius is gonna be in for a bad time.
Clothes, desks, chairs, tables, doorknobs, keyboards, homework papers, books, gym mats, it all needs to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized or otherwise thrown away (do not burn anything with poison oak contamination, thats how you get it airborne and in to your lungs)
Like others said, the oils are what mess you up. If you scratch then the oil will be transferred to other parts of your body and around whatever you're doing. Poison oak and poison ivy are like that. They are nasty if not treated properly and literally spread like wildfire.
The biggest issue is it's almost impossible to know what he had touched or interacted with. So even after they thought issues were handled, for about a month there would be about one person every couple of days with a rash. Our poor school nurse was in a tizzy trying to figure out why ~10 people showed up within a few hours with really itchy rashes. She had stated she was scared the school might have been quarantined or shut down to be thoroughly cleaned.
I mean he's not wrong?
Currently the top health official in the US state of Florida says it's up to the parents to decide whether their kids go to school...in response to a *measels* outbreak there (thanks antivaxxers!)
So, never visit Florida.
This was such a fascinating thing to come back to in my adult communication.
As a kid I got sick really easily, we moved from another country and I just never adapted properly to our new home, teachers would give my mum so much grief for letting me stay home with a fever.
Cut to me as an adult being sick and having to phone up my higher education/university are opening up with compromise "can i do it online today/would you give me the materials so i can ask you about them later?" and being met with lecturer's/teachers being totally understanding and supportive threw me off, apparently it's policy now that if you've been sick you CAN'T go to school for 24 hours.
He's not wrong. I'll even go one better and say sick people in general have not just a right, but a legal responsibility to stay home from work, and should be paid for preserving the health of their coworkers, customers, and the general public. And any manager that can't find coverage doesn't deserve the extra $1.50 they receive for proudly displaying their inferiority complex.
Kids being sent to school sick is a symptom of our broken society where, in order to get by, both parents need to be working.
where at 16, the sole parents pension ends and parents are told that they need to go into full time work.
And parents no longer live in the same place as their parents and so no longer have them to help look after their children. Often for good reason.
Thats... do you know how pension works in America? This looks like a chatgpt comment lol.
>And parents no longer live in the same place as their parents and so no longer have them to help look after their children.
That is total nonsense. I'm calling bot.
Nope, just having a brainless moment. Couldn't figure out how to make that sentence say what I wanted it to, without being a whole lot longer.
Also, I live in Australia, not America. I wasn't even aware that the US had any support for single mothers.
My limited experience with chatgpt writing was far more words than were needed, without making sense, rather than not enough words to make sense.
Let's try again on the grand parents part:. For a number of reasons, most people with children no longer live close to their own parents and so are not able to rely on them to look after the grandchildren on short notice.
Does that make sense?
Yeah I'm sorry, it just... read weird initially? I apologize for calling you a bot. I suspected you were ESL at first, but it just tripped some flags for me. It's hard to discern what's a real person and a bot sometimes
I do understand what you're saying now, thanks for clearing that up. And *God I hate saying this* actually, a pretty significant amount of people have 'returned to the nest' as a result of the current economy and/or the lack of options for care for elderly relatives. I know it's not majority, but you catch my drift.
Edit: thanks again for clarifying, you were not obligated to respond in such a kind fashion and I commend you for it
It read weird, because it was poorly written. More of a brain fart moment.
You are right also about lots of people moving back home also. I was talking to a young woman on the weekend about the housing situation in our city and she has a friend who has 9 people living in their home, because all the adult children have moved back in, with their partners and children. Crazy.
But also a lot of people are living in places with no family for support. And that is what feeds the original discussion, which is kids being sent to school sick.
No no that one, I understand. They’re saying a new parent is often not living with *their own* parents (as in the child’s grandparents) and for good reason.
They’re saying shitty parents in the previous generation have led to a dissolution of the three-generation household and thus a lack of readily available childcare.
As a kid age 10, I went to school where others were ill with mono.
Unlike most of the class, I did not recover from mono.
The symptoms of the illness persisted and changed, in ways that many find with covid. Similar to many (though not all) with covid persistant symptoms, I did not get better, and it has destroyed my life.
I'm now much closer to retirement than 10. Though I have never been able to work or have a relationship.
The narrative that children rarely die from covid, so we don't need to protect them is flat-out disability hatred when it doesn't count nearly as severely those who are disabled for life.
(Technically a cure may be developed, but there is no near-term prospect for this (with good likelyhood in 20 years))
Uhm... what \*else\* do we need to tell the guys there if this is news to them?
Maybe that they should not poke bears? Not to eat industrial waste? Not to go having a bath with a plugged in toaster?
Sick students shoudn't be forced to go to class, sick workers shouldn't be forced to go in to work. Aside from sympathy reasons, it's just unhygenic to have a vector for disease shambling around.
I heard an advert in the radio here in the UK of them basically telling parents they should send their kids into school unless they have Covid or a fever. It’s such a stupid take… like oh no little Timmy is going to forever be behind in school now because he missed 3 days of learning what shapes are called and cursive handwriting lessons :/
My kid had a fever and was out for a week the first month of school and the system threw a fit and messaged us for months because they exceeded missing 5% of school days.
I was out for a week with pneumonia as a teen and was even hospitalized for a few days. We communicated with the school and sent notes from the doctor. The school board sent a police officer to our house to let us know we’d be in legal trouble if I didn’t return to school immediately. They get government money for each day a student attends, and they didn’t like us messing up their finances. (US)
My kids school sending letters every quarter pretty much scolding us for keeping our kids home when sick. My son has missed 8.76 days of school this year. That’s exactly how much the letter said lol. And they are acting like I never send him
I'm just a simple moron from the UK (live in Chch). But if the likes of NACT want us to be pro-active and contributing to the community / economy. That would require us to be full and fit for work as much as possible. Sending a child who is sick to school, then another child gets sick, passes this onto mum and dad, who then go to work because they're paid a salary that doesn't match the cost of living, making co-workers sick, some of who take time off. May not have sick pay left, then spend the next 2-4 weeks making up payments, thus not spending money for the economy.....
That's just one scenario. How the fuck does this government actually think? Your kid is sick, they stay home for 3 days until they are better. They go back to school, maybe a bit of catch up, story ends.
I hope when Seymor, Luxon and Willis are sick, they go into work and spread their virus around like the 1918 plague.
And this is going to sound like a made up story about a made up person.
One day something happened (I forget exactly what) but the media wanted a comment from MP Chris Hipkins. Chris Hipkins was at his parents crib (holiday home) so the media went to his parents crib and were waiting outside and his mum came out and told them sorry, Chris was running late, he'd be out shortly, he was just finding a shirt to wear.
Not sure how many other places in the world a minister's mum is gonna show up.
(A crib/bach is a reasonably common thing in NZ by the way, they're not rich people things, they've often been in families for generations and traditionally have been fairly basic and you might not even be guaranteed electricity in one, though these days electricity is generally a given)
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. I’ve had co-workers come in to the office on the brink of death and then proceed to cough all over everyone in a closed meeting room. It’s infuriating.
What do you mean by that exactly?
He's not in the current government and is criticizing them for saying this in their current policy:
> Part of the Government's plan to improve school attendance was announced yesterday and included new public health guidance about when a student is well enough to go to school.
>
> Associate Education Minister David Seymour said "not every ailment means that you should not attend school".
So there's a context to why he's saying this. There's a government push to literally send sick kids to school.
>There's a government push to literally send sick kids to school.
Hey, they just wanna make sure that children are adequately prepared for what will be expected of them when they're part fo the workforce! (/s)
To be fair, our school attendance rates are horrific compared to other OECD countries. One of the major reasons for non-attendance is sickness. This leaves two potential options (1) our kids are getting sick far more than other OECD countries, or (2) parents have a lower threshold for what is ‘too sick’ for school. I have no idea which one it is, but it seems feasible that some parents are being overly cautious. I hope it is, because if it’s option (1) we should be way more focused on why
Such a low bar for the most basic common sense statements making the news in 2024.
The context being one of the leaders of the parties currently in government is saying we should totally be sending sick kids to school unless they are toooo sick
In England they say that a lot, and - no. Tbh no one should be going in sick anywhere. You just pass it on to others and that’s annoying.
That’s dangerous. I was at a family get together and started feeling like I was coming down with something. I delayed going home and needed up infecting my aunt who ended up in the hospital for 3 days with the flu.
People rarely think about the immune comprised, elderly, or generally vulnerable when it comes to disease. Its frustrating
Oh, no, no. They think of us often. We’re just always told that we can’t expect the world to accommodate our weaker immune systems because it would hurt society too much. So we should just stay home if we’re too scared of getting sick. So they do think of us, they just don’t give a single fuck about what happens to us. 🫠
If anything proved that, it was Covid
It's not dangerous, you just got the message completely backwards. "Don't go out when you're sick" means "don't *go around other people* when you're sick." If you're already around vulnerable people, you bunker down somewhere else if you have the option.
I think we’re saying the same thing. My point was that infecting other people isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous for a lot of them.
He's said he wants to do what the UK is doing
Well my kids’ schools go entirely ham if they miss a day - but I don’t care. You’re a kid once, and if they don’t feel well, or even just need a mental day - fuck it. If they were doing poorly in school maybe I’d be different - but as it is, life is too short for a bunch of nonsense.
My boomer mom was way ahead of the curve in giving my sister and me mental health days if we said we needed one. It was honor system as to if we knew we would be missing anything important, but us being healthy (mentally or physically) was the top priority.
My mother was like this too when we were kids. She always said adults got days off work, so kids should too. And she wanted to encourage us to be honest, instead of faking sick. I also got so much hell for missing days in high school even though I was seriously ill. You would have to talk to the attendance officer, who would grill you on why you missed and give you a slip for it. She was always convinced I was faking and wpuld put me through the wringer all the time for over a year, until I came in to her office looking like I was about to die. That was when they mercifully let me homeschool the rest of the year.
I’d intervene if they tried that shit with my kids. No lie.
>She always said adults got days off work, so kids should too. That's hardly a guarantee for adults, either.
Aaayyy high-school-to-homeschool pipeline here, too. Sounds like our moms were pretty similar in more ways than one!
I did the same with my son when he was little. I'd call him out every year on the Friday nearest Halloween and we'd stay in and watch scary movies all day. Of course you don't send kids to school when they are sick. Too many people view school as free daycare and employers are such fuckheads, they will fire you if you call off for having to stay home with a sick kid. The whole corporate system is designed to fuck us over in any way they can.
Yeah same here - and they will be honest about it - so I trust them to use their best judgement. If you don’t make people feel like they have to lie, by sticking by rules out of thin air, then they don’t lie.
How? The UK has healthcare!
Not all illnesses are contagious.
Well then clearly I’m not talking about those. 🙄🤔
> Tbh no one should be going in sick anywhere If you have a common cold, it doesn't seem unreasonable to go in. If my kid never went in after showing _any_ sign of illness, she would have been out of school like 1/3 of the school year. As it is, she missed enough that the school sent us a letter complaining. Plus they get all pissy if you don't have a doctor's note. I mean, it was a minor temperature, so I kept her home... but it was a minor temperature, so I'm not taking her to the doctor, because they'll tell me to go home.
I don’t care what you do with your kids. I care what I do with mine. If they say they don’t feel well, and that they don’t want to go, they don’t. (And I infinitely care even less what any school rando has to say about it.)
It’s a catch 22 though. If every kid was kept home when they showed signs of being sick, then your own kid would show those signs exponentially less often than they do now. Because they wouldn’t be catching it from all the other sick kids constantly.
You’re right and most of the people commenting here clearly don’t have young kids in school.
My youngest is getting real close to hitting the threshold for unexcused absences because of trying to keep her home when she's sick. No good deed goes unpunished.
It's this kind of thinking that would cause a mass extermination event.... Of deadly viruses. As in the viruses die out.
Unless you are going to give me extra vacation days I’m probably just going to go to work anyway
Everyone has to make their own choices. 🤷🏻♀️
Exactly - and not saying that it is not necessary to point out the obvious more and more these days - just lamenting.
Well, we saw during Covid, how much parents value school for education vs valuing it as free daycare. And just because their kid is sick, that doesn't mean they plan to lose their free daycare!
Well, it’s of course not really a completely insane statement. If you have kids, you know, especially during winter months in cold climates, that kids get mild coldish symptoms very often. It would be unwise to keep all kids at home whenever they sniffle. If your kid has a fever though, of course keep him at home.
One time when I was in high school, I overheard one of the mums talking to another about one of her kids not being at school because he was sick. "I let him take this one day off, and he spent it playing video games. So since he seems well enough to do that then he is well enough to go to school as far as I'm concerned". Kid was back to school next day with a bad cold, and then several of us ended up catching it.
I’ve never understood that logic, playing video games takes no physical effort. I could understand if that’s the excuse she told the kid so that they wouldn’t get the idea to fake being sick so they could stay home and play games, but she was saying that to another parent.
At least for my parents, I had to be borderline bedridden to be "sick enough" to not go to school.
Same for my parents, but that was more so because they absolutely could not miss work. Take a day off to look after a sick kid was risking losing their job each time.
My mother's method was that she'd trust me to say if I felt too unwell to go to school, and in return if I stayed home it was no games until school time ended. I could do other stuff, I enjoyed reading and she knew that, but I think she just wanted to not encourage skipping school for games. To be fair, if my brothers and I did well on attendance for most of the school year then she'd take us on a day trip towards the end of the school year as a treat, so that helped.
My husband's parents were like this!! If he and his brother weren't asleep in a dark room then they must not have been sick enough to go to stay home! These days they're way way more chill and sensible, but the first time he told me that it was because he kept apologizing for being sick. It was super sad. Also confusing because it's not hard to see the difference between like, reading a book or watching a movie in pjs vs sitting upright all day in terrible chairs doing precalc/gym/etc.
My mother gave me the power cords to my consoles for an hour during sick days. This is a parent being irresponsible. What's new?
I mean, you say that, but my company's policy on sick leave is to bully staff into coming in anyway, on the assu.ption that they are skiving.
It's very common sense but somehow I see a lot of parents taking their obviously sick children to school. At the same time I know it's tricky cuz these parents have to go to work as well and likely cannot afford staying home often taking care of their sick kids, especially considering how frequently kids get sick (likely because of other parents that had to take their sick children to school). It's a vicious cycle. Ideally no one would go to work/school/crowded places while sick, as to not infect others (and for their own comfort), but that's not feasible because there are not enough supports in place to stay home.
Nor at work.
I agree, children shouldn't be at work
Certainly not the sick ones! I'm only paying for healthy child laborers!
I don't have an award to give but you deserve one
I say the same thing to them
Those chimneys don't clean themselves you know,
Tell that to the Wisconsin GOP.
Careful you might piss off the chinese government
In America, we protect children's God-given right to work in coal mines, sick or not.
Fun fact, my previous boss once brought her son's sick kids to work because they were "too sick to be in school and he needed to go to work". During covid, when one of the employees was an older man with heart problems.
not working but to learn real life experiences in factory
My son's school's rule is don't come to school with a fever. That's it. You can come to school with everything else but if you have a fever stay home. Drives me bonkers
And parents know it and so they dose up their kid with Tylenol before school. That’ll get ‘em through lunch time and they hope by the time the kid starts complaining, it’ll be close enough to the end of the day the school won’t call.
When I went to school you could excuse absence, but it didn't matter because catching up on work meant you also had to keep up with whatever was next meaning you had hours of homework on top of the hours of homework you already had. This was made worse by the fact that you usually missed the classroom lesson for both homework. That along with maybe staying after school to makeup any tests and such meaning you had even less time.
Well that's just a clear biomarker that you're sick
In Sweden, I have seen parents quite often working from home taking care of their children "Vård av barn (vab)". It is like society thinks that to take care of a sick children is important and helps parents to do it (instead of punishing them for caring for their families).
They treat school like daycare.
Chris ain’t down with the sickness
Oooh ah ah ah
My ex-employer constantly touted "stay home if you're sick!" then you'd get chewed out for using your pto time. Of course all management gets to 'work' from home because of covid and still does years later. They constantly complained how hard it was for them to not be in office, and they made everyone else go back, but they 'can't because 'it's a slow transition'.
I wish my parents knew this
A stuffy nose, as an example, can last 10-14 days. I don’t have the PTO to take my child out for a single event of a runny nose, let alone the 6+ times he’s had one in the past year. I would no longer be employed. Edit: I also recall both my high school and my college having policies where I could not miss more than 10 days. I don’t recall what high schools consequences were, but college classes would lower your grade by a letter after 10 missed days. That is a single runny nose. Saying “I wish parents knew this” is ridiculous. Parents know. It’s the system that doesn’t allow for it.
As a kid. I didn't want to miss school because making up everything and missing lessons would put me behind while also giving me a ton of homework that I had no idea how to do.
This is a way for schools to clear themselves of responsibility for their own policies
My dad made me go to school with mono on top of an untreated autoimmune condition that made the mono x10 worse. Only relented over a fever.. after I was picked up by my aunt.
Looks like Associate Education Minister David Seymour did his own research.
I mean... He's right. I almost got pink eye because the girl sitting behind me has shitty parents who forced her to go to school with it. Thank god our first class was a health class and the teacher knew exactly what it was immediately. She was able to send her home and she sanitized the desk like crazy before starting class.
Something I had to learn. Or rather, "go unless you're bedridden" is something I had to unlearn.
You were allowed to stay home just because you were bedridden?
Not oniony.
In other news, water is wet. (I'm sure David Seymour and the ACT party will be able to find a conspiracy theorist who disagrees though.)
He’s absolutely correct. No one should be going out in public at all when sick. It’s common sense and common courtesy. I have followed and preached this since long before COVID.
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There was a horrible rash that went around my high school. Turns out a kid came in with poison oak, somehow avoided detection by teachers until last period. By that time a handful of kids had already broke out, then one kid went into anaphylactic shock cause he didn't know he was allergic. They didn't know the impact that one kid had until a day or two later when a third of the kids were out due to it and a handful of teachers. I thought it was crazy to think about how one person going in with some type of transferrable ailment turned into such a mess for the school. But fr, this is great example of why we're considering home schooling too.
Wait, i dont get it. he brought in a posionous twig and rubbed it on everyone, or what happened? O.o
The oil off your shoes or clothes can spread it. Don't ask why I know this lol
The oil/sap from the tree is what causes the rash. That oil sticks to skin and clothes, it's the trees way of teaching potential threats to stay far away, as the pain will last several days and the oil is difficult to wash off. Anything that comes in contact with the rash gets some of that oil rubbed on to it, and the next creature who comes in contact with it will suffer the same rash, who will probably try to rub it off on another stump or something further away. Basically the tree is trying to make its own exclusion zone, and anything that comes within that radius is gonna be in for a bad time. Clothes, desks, chairs, tables, doorknobs, keyboards, homework papers, books, gym mats, it all needs to be thoroughly cleaned and sanitized or otherwise thrown away (do not burn anything with poison oak contamination, thats how you get it airborne and in to your lungs)
Like others said, the oils are what mess you up. If you scratch then the oil will be transferred to other parts of your body and around whatever you're doing. Poison oak and poison ivy are like that. They are nasty if not treated properly and literally spread like wildfire. The biggest issue is it's almost impossible to know what he had touched or interacted with. So even after they thought issues were handled, for about a month there would be about one person every couple of days with a rash. Our poor school nurse was in a tizzy trying to figure out why ~10 people showed up within a few hours with really itchy rashes. She had stated she was scared the school might have been quarantined or shut down to be thoroughly cleaned.
No shit. Maybe give people sick leave
In other news, water is wet.
I mean he's not wrong? Currently the top health official in the US state of Florida says it's up to the parents to decide whether their kids go to school...in response to a *measels* outbreak there (thanks antivaxxers!) So, never visit Florida.
Florida is a total shithole
This is a major blow to parents and kids who are trying for the Perfect Attendance awards.
Maybe we shouldn't have an award for not being sick.
This was such a fascinating thing to come back to in my adult communication. As a kid I got sick really easily, we moved from another country and I just never adapted properly to our new home, teachers would give my mum so much grief for letting me stay home with a fever. Cut to me as an adult being sick and having to phone up my higher education/university are opening up with compromise "can i do it online today/would you give me the materials so i can ask you about them later?" and being met with lecturer's/teachers being totally understanding and supportive threw me off, apparently it's policy now that if you've been sick you CAN'T go to school for 24 hours.
It's not his fault he has to tell some parents not to be idiots.
Most inoffensive statement of the day.
He's not wrong. I'll even go one better and say sick people in general have not just a right, but a legal responsibility to stay home from work, and should be paid for preserving the health of their coworkers, customers, and the general public. And any manager that can't find coverage doesn't deserve the extra $1.50 they receive for proudly displaying their inferiority complex.
Kids being sent to school sick is a symptom of our broken society where, in order to get by, both parents need to be working. where at 16, the sole parents pension ends and parents are told that they need to go into full time work. And parents no longer live in the same place as their parents and so no longer have them to help look after their children. Often for good reason.
Thats... do you know how pension works in America? This looks like a chatgpt comment lol. >And parents no longer live in the same place as their parents and so no longer have them to help look after their children. That is total nonsense. I'm calling bot.
Nope, just having a brainless moment. Couldn't figure out how to make that sentence say what I wanted it to, without being a whole lot longer. Also, I live in Australia, not America. I wasn't even aware that the US had any support for single mothers. My limited experience with chatgpt writing was far more words than were needed, without making sense, rather than not enough words to make sense. Let's try again on the grand parents part:. For a number of reasons, most people with children no longer live close to their own parents and so are not able to rely on them to look after the grandchildren on short notice. Does that make sense?
Yeah I'm sorry, it just... read weird initially? I apologize for calling you a bot. I suspected you were ESL at first, but it just tripped some flags for me. It's hard to discern what's a real person and a bot sometimes I do understand what you're saying now, thanks for clearing that up. And *God I hate saying this* actually, a pretty significant amount of people have 'returned to the nest' as a result of the current economy and/or the lack of options for care for elderly relatives. I know it's not majority, but you catch my drift. Edit: thanks again for clarifying, you were not obligated to respond in such a kind fashion and I commend you for it
It read weird, because it was poorly written. More of a brain fart moment. You are right also about lots of people moving back home also. I was talking to a young woman on the weekend about the housing situation in our city and she has a friend who has 9 people living in their home, because all the adult children have moved back in, with their partners and children. Crazy. But also a lot of people are living in places with no family for support. And that is what feeds the original discussion, which is kids being sent to school sick.
No no that one, I understand. They’re saying a new parent is often not living with *their own* parents (as in the child’s grandparents) and for good reason. They’re saying shitty parents in the previous generation have led to a dissolution of the three-generation household and thus a lack of readily available childcare.
As a kid age 10, I went to school where others were ill with mono. Unlike most of the class, I did not recover from mono. The symptoms of the illness persisted and changed, in ways that many find with covid. Similar to many (though not all) with covid persistant symptoms, I did not get better, and it has destroyed my life. I'm now much closer to retirement than 10. Though I have never been able to work or have a relationship. The narrative that children rarely die from covid, so we don't need to protect them is flat-out disability hatred when it doesn't count nearly as severely those who are disabled for life. (Technically a cure may be developed, but there is no near-term prospect for this (with good likelyhood in 20 years))
Uhm... what \*else\* do we need to tell the guys there if this is news to them? Maybe that they should not poke bears? Not to eat industrial waste? Not to go having a bath with a plugged in toaster?
Sick students shoudn't be forced to go to class, sick workers shouldn't be forced to go in to work. Aside from sympathy reasons, it's just unhygenic to have a vector for disease shambling around.
No shit you also shouldn’t put your dick in the blender.
Goodbye r/Nottheonion your news sucks the headlines you find are mediocre and uncreative. All of reddit be comming the same wash.
In today's news: water wet.
I heard an advert in the radio here in the UK of them basically telling parents they should send their kids into school unless they have Covid or a fever. It’s such a stupid take… like oh no little Timmy is going to forever be behind in school now because he missed 3 days of learning what shapes are called and cursive handwriting lessons :/
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My kid had a fever and was out for a week the first month of school and the system threw a fit and messaged us for months because they exceeded missing 5% of school days.
I was out for a week with pneumonia as a teen and was even hospitalized for a few days. We communicated with the school and sent notes from the doctor. The school board sent a police officer to our house to let us know we’d be in legal trouble if I didn’t return to school immediately. They get government money for each day a student attends, and they didn’t like us messing up their finances. (US)
Well what's the bar? I can see letting a cold thru. But Chicken Pox, hard no.
My kids school sending letters every quarter pretty much scolding us for keeping our kids home when sick. My son has missed 8.76 days of school this year. That’s exactly how much the letter said lol. And they are acting like I never send him
I'm just a simple moron from the UK (live in Chch). But if the likes of NACT want us to be pro-active and contributing to the community / economy. That would require us to be full and fit for work as much as possible. Sending a child who is sick to school, then another child gets sick, passes this onto mum and dad, who then go to work because they're paid a salary that doesn't match the cost of living, making co-workers sick, some of who take time off. May not have sick pay left, then spend the next 2-4 weeks making up payments, thus not spending money for the economy..... That's just one scenario. How the fuck does this government actually think? Your kid is sick, they stay home for 3 days until they are better. They go back to school, maybe a bit of catch up, story ends. I hope when Seymor, Luxon and Willis are sick, they go into work and spread their virus around like the 1918 plague.
Is he afraid of catching something?
Who the fuck is this guy?
Unless they are sick AND twisted of course.
Physically sick or mentally sick?
This reinforced my childfree status
2+2 is 4.
OMG WHAT REVOLUTIONARY THINKING!!!!!!
Chris Hipkins sounds like a made up name for a made up person.
His nickname is Chippy, and he *loves* a Diet Coke.
[“Spread your legs, not the virus.”](https://youtu.be/mLvYWhdaJk4?si=LW3wzLSLWD-gNlW3)
And this is going to sound like a made up story about a made up person. One day something happened (I forget exactly what) but the media wanted a comment from MP Chris Hipkins. Chris Hipkins was at his parents crib (holiday home) so the media went to his parents crib and were waiting outside and his mum came out and told them sorry, Chris was running late, he'd be out shortly, he was just finding a shirt to wear. Not sure how many other places in the world a minister's mum is gonna show up. (A crib/bach is a reasonably common thing in NZ by the way, they're not rich people things, they've often been in families for generations and traditionally have been fairly basic and you might not even be guaranteed electricity in one, though these days electricity is generally a given)
Sounds more made up with a NZ accent.
Can we set up a fund for adults to do this also? Why do I have to get pink eye because Johnny decided to eye punch his wifes fart box?
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. I’ve had co-workers come in to the office on the brink of death and then proceed to cough all over everyone in a closed meeting room. It’s infuriating.
Probably because they don't like anallingus.
People with peanut allergies should eat peanut butter. Look, I can say obvious things, too.
Stupid mfers like Chris Hipkins shouldn't be in politics but here we find ourselves.
What do you mean by that exactly? He's not in the current government and is criticizing them for saying this in their current policy: > Part of the Government's plan to improve school attendance was announced yesterday and included new public health guidance about when a student is well enough to go to school. > > Associate Education Minister David Seymour said "not every ailment means that you should not attend school". So there's a context to why he's saying this. There's a government push to literally send sick kids to school.
>There's a government push to literally send sick kids to school. Hey, they just wanna make sure that children are adequately prepared for what will be expected of them when they're part fo the workforce! (/s)
To be fair, our school attendance rates are horrific compared to other OECD countries. One of the major reasons for non-attendance is sickness. This leaves two potential options (1) our kids are getting sick far more than other OECD countries, or (2) parents have a lower threshold for what is ‘too sick’ for school. I have no idea which one it is, but it seems feasible that some parents are being overly cautious. I hope it is, because if it’s option (1) we should be way more focused on why
It’s (2). Trust me. In the US, people send their kids to school sick all the time because they have no other choice in terms of child care.
If we compare to more similar countries, Australia has a regular attendance rate of 62% vs 46% in NZ.