At a time when President Barack Obama has declared the outbreak of the H1N1 virus a national emergency, health officials continue to tell students at schools across the country to stay home when they are sick to prevent the disease from spreading.  The state Department of Public Health advises students to stay home until they have been without a fever for at least 24 hours.  Walpole High School’s policy suggests students remain home for a minimum of 7 days when they have been affected by the virus.  The 7-day respite from school is intended to preclude the flu from spreading to others at school.   As winter fast approaches and even more illnesses are undoubtedly going to be moving throughout the student body and staff, the practice of awarding perfect attendance certificates to students is increasingly unnecessary.

When students are sick with a serious illness like the swine flu, or even a less serious but still highly-contagious sickness like the common cold, students should remain home until they feel truly well enough to return to school.  Despite the obvious risks associated with allowing students to return to school before they feel healthy, Walpole High School continues to offer perfect attendance certificates, awarding students who come to school every day, no matter what the obstacle.  While the certificates are more of a token of the student’s dedication in going to school on-time every day and have no actual major value, in principle the idea of offering an incentive for students to come to school every day is a bad idea considering the serious health risks to others when an ill student comes to school.  Walpole High should not be sending contradictory messages to parents and students – telling parents that students should stay home when sick – then rewarding the opposite practice.  It is obvious that perfect attendance is beneficial to a student’s academic success, but there are times as well when students should stay home and rest when they are ill.  Students are already rewarded for coming to school every day by earning good grades in their classes, and do not need a perfect attendance certificate to affirm their academic standing.  When students miss even one day of school, they have to make up a lot of school work.  On the first day back, “you sit in class and you have no idea what the teacher is talking about,” attests Senior Alex Barmakian.

If Walpole were to suspend its practice of awarding students for perfect attendance, it would not be the first school district to do so.  In Braintree, for example, perfect attendance awards are no longer given to students.  School Superintendent Peter Kurzberg told The Patriot Ledger, “We have a number of students who work hard at keeping perfect attendance.  While we encourage students to come to school every day, we encourage them to stay home when they are sick.”  In Buffalo, NY, school officials also ended their perfect attendance certificates, for the same reason as Braintree and a growing number of other schools across the nation. 

Like Braintree and Buffalo, the school should work to help contain major illness outbreaks by ending the perfect attendance certificates for good.  The perfect attendance certificates cost money to produce and have little more than token value for a student who receives it. Senior Michael Demarais, for example, who received a certificate as a freshman, admitted the award “does not help him with college.”   Junior Brigette Lawton, agreed, saying she feels indifferent when she receives a perfect attendance certificate.  The school should be asking students to come to school when they are healthy, and stay home when they are sick.   It is better for the school community as a whole if administrators do not dangle the promise of a perfect attendance certificate in front of students as a reason for them to attend school every day.  While staying home from school is frowned upon in any situation, students will perform better academically if they do not sit in class feeling miserable and sick.  School officials, as a result, would have to contend with an illness that spreads to other students and staff and makes others too unhealthy to come to school.  Perfect attendance certificates simply do not make sense at a time when the school needs to cut costs wherever it can in a swine flu-paranoid world.