By Michelle Pitcher
Editor-in-Chief
I had a 101° fever. I was completely aware of this fact – it was quite difficult to ignore – yet I was sitting in my Econ class learning about tax corruption in less developed countries.
Coppell High School’s policy clearly states that a student can be absent for no more than three days in a semester and still be exempt from their finals. For many students, myself included, going through the school day feeling like death only to go home and nap until morning is still preferable to taking the dreaded finals. All necessary measures will be taken to meet these requirements.
This is where the holes in the system begin to leak.
When school policy begins to take a toll on student health, the problem has become too serious to ignore. Students become so concerned with finishing the school year a few days early that they put themselves at risk of
major illnesses. Bronchitis, if left untreated, can manifest itself in the lungs, leading to pneumonia. Allergies can lead to sinus infections. Not to mention the fact that stress and sleep deprivation, when coupled with any sort of illness, only make symptoms worse. When students are forced to choose between their health and their stress level, many will take measures to alleviate the latter rather than the former. Students come to school with fevers, infections, viruses, many of which are highly contagious, and they expose classmates and teachers to these horrible ailments. A vicious cycle began with the start of the semester; one student’s desire to be exempt jeopardizes another’s desire to be exempt jeopardizes another’s, and so on.
Exams are literally starting to make people sick.
I have had many a week when I completely forget what it feels like to be healthy. I attend every class, I write down all the notes, I exchange pleasantries with classmates, but I retain nothing. Being in a situation in which your health is slowly but steadily deteriorating tends to put a damper on scholastic achievement. It is hardly the ideal learning environment when half of the class gets up every five minutes to blow their nose while the other half dissolves into horrific coughing fits. There are times when my history classroom sounds like an emphysema ward.
Something has got to give.
The answer does not lie in making exam exemptions more difficult to obtain, and it, unfortunately, does not lie in granting exemptions to all. Stipulations need to be made to accommodate students when they are ill. I understand the legitimacy of having an attendance requirement, but isn’t the core of this requirement to ensure that the students are present and learning? I can personally attest to the fact that we may be present physically, but mentally we are far gone, and we are certainly not learning. Perhaps absences recommended by doctors as part of a treatment should not be counted against a student. Perhaps sick days that can be accounted for by a doctor’s note should go the way of school related absences.
We should not be punished for our immune systems, and we should not be in a situation where we have no choice but to expose other students to our germs. Most of all, I want to be able to crawl back into bed after getting sick before school, not crawl into my car in the hope that I can somehow make it through the rest of the day with minimal damage.
Take pity on the weary. As it was once aptly put, we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.
