Senior Skip Day

  It is late tonight for me. I look over at the clock and it ticks away. The hours today are flying by so quickly. I spent the last two days talking about prom. Alcohol and kids attitudes outside in the real world made great topics to cover and to explore. On Monday was the day that most senior level teachers hate, the infamous senior skip day. This is the day that the seniors think they can skip with little to no consequence to them. This does not appear on any calendar that I know of, it is not on the calendar for my district, and is one of those things that the Monday after prom results in classes that are half empty or worse. Monday was a ghost town. It sort of reminded me what the news said that school would look like if one of those epidemics took hold. Class after class was devoid of people, and lesson plans for the week had to be scrapped or drastically modified. It is one of these days that a campus that is academically focused versus one that is not shines through.
  In my experience senior skip day is not something that people really participated in. School districts loath it, and most including the one that I graduated from, made it one of those days that you did not want to miss. They would schedule some important test or review on the day we were all suppose to skip. This day was not really any more than something that kids dreamed of doing when I was in school. Today, it has become an artificial holiday. Kids planned to return from prom festivities on Monday because they were ok with missing only one day. Perhaps I am wrong, maybe it is a big deal even in academically focused campuses, but this one glaring example shows all the work we have left to do. Some of the kids that came needed to be there, while some planned for it at the beginning of the year carefully budgeting their time off. How can we focus academics when a school does not make this day a joke? I had kids legitimately tell me that this was a school sanctioned holiday. This sort of misinformation needs to be handled. The only way to eliminate this as being a problem is to change the culture of the school. To emphasize academics and school functions as a higher level than the social lives of the students. The problem with this is that society gets in the way of this thinking. We push kids going to college but loose ourselves in the details. These lost details like work ethic add up to create a monster that stands in the way of our education, not helps it along. We take kids out of school for any excuse that we can and we start to tarnish the importance of education. This problem may not seem like a large one, it is just one day after all, but it represents so much that is wrong with our society. It represents the lack of importance that our kids and our society places on education.

Until Tomorrow,

Education is...

One of the few things a person is willing to pay for and not get.

William Lowe Bryan (1860–1955) 10th president of Indiana University (1902 to 1937).