What If It’s Not Extra?
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Brief back-story: We homeschool, as a rule. For all the usual reasons, including moral and religious values, smart kids, enjoying the time together as a family, flexibility, etc.
For High School, Nick auditioned and was accepted into the Band Magnet program at Coral Reef Senior High – a top-rated school with a great track record of kids going to All State Marching Band, good colleges, getting scholarships, etc. Between the music and the AP classes, since he wanted to go, we decided it was a good thing. He’s now in his second year.
The Miami-Dade County School System has a number of convoluted regulations about a student’s attendance.
From talking to various teachers, administrators, and friends, I understand that, by and large, these have come about in an effort to keep parents from taking their children out of school frivolously. Apparently, there was a big problem with repeated week-long absences for family trips to Disney World and such.
So now there are several sets of rules in place:
Excused vs. unexcused.
The definition here is much stricter that it used to be. Essentially only the child’s illness, or a death in the immediate family is “excused”.
Accumulate five unexcused absences in a semester, or ten in a school year, and they have the right to withhold your grades and credit for the entire semester/year.
We ran up against this with our recent trip to Mississippi to visit Wolf’s dad after his cancer diagnosis. Quite a struggle over “excusing” those absences, which even had another entire chapter after the saga I originally posted (over at As for My House!
Eligibility restrictions.
Any student who accumulates ten absences in a school year – regardless of their “excused” status – becomes ineligible to participate in all extra-curricular activities.
In other words, I suppose, “If you’re not present enough to reasonably be doing your school work, you shouldn’t be allowed to participate in ‘the fun stuff.’”
Such a rule seems designed to deter people from taking those excessive absences even if they can get their doctor to sign off on it and get it excused.
This is the one with which I am currently at odds.
Nick had five absences during the first half of the school year, all due to illness.
Then we took our six-school-day trip to Mississippi. Yep, that’s eleven, and ineligible.
But that’s not the problem!
We worked with the Assistant Principal to file an appeal with the District, and they granted a waiver for those six days for Eligibility purposes. So he’s back to five.
But Nick has been sick the last two weeks. Pretty darn sick, and out of school four days before all was said and done.
NINE absences!
So if he misses another single day during the remaining three months of school, he will become ineligible. And although the absences were excused, we have no way to know if the District would see fit to grant his eligibility back on appeal.
But here’s the thing…
Words mean things – including Extra-Curricular.
Here’s what it says at Dictionary.com:
ex·tra·cur·ric·u·lar /ˌɛkstrəkəˈrɪkyələr/ [ek-struh-kuh-rik-yuh-ler] –adjective
1. outside the regular curriculum or program of courses: football, orchestra, and other extracurricular activities.
Outside the regular program of courses.
Not something you’ll see there with a grade next to it on your report card.
So… Football, right? Makes sense.
If you can’t play in the football game, it’s no fun for you. It’s no fun for the team. But it doesn’t hurt your GPA.
They list Orchestra, which in a regular school setting might be something you do similarly after school, outside of your regular classes.
I remember how distraught my friend Vicki and I were, after months of practicing, when we couldn’t participate in the Senior Lip Synch because our third pal, Tammie, had gotten a bad grade and become ineligible.
But in this case, Band is Nick’s regular, graded class – two of his six, in fact. It’s “Curricular,” you might say.
They do some semantic weaseling, of course.
This policy is all spelled out in a two-page Contract that looks like something we shoud have signed when Nick started there… And we may have, in the avalance of paperwork, even though I don’t recall it.
The vast majority of the document explains how the student is representing their school, and needs to uphold standards like good behavior, dress code, etc.
When they get to eligibility, the prime requirement is a 2.0 GPA.
They also carefully use the phrase “Interscholastic Competitions or Performances” rather than “Extra-Curricular Activities”… although to me this leaves open the highly relevant question of whether they are discussing Interscholastic Events (be they Competitions or Performances), or (Interscholastic Competitions) or (any Performances).
But the real core issue is simply this:
If Nick does not participate in a concert, Nick will receive one or more grades of “F”, which will lower his grade in that class accordingly.
How is it reasonable to say that the school District is prohibiting a child from participating in a Requied Classroom Activity?
Can that even be legal?
“We’re not going to allow you to do your assigned classwork”??
A once-and-future full-time RV family shares their adventures - homeschooling, home business, life in an RV, Christian living, interesting travel and dining experiences, you name it...
