It was the Friday before spring break, but at Jackson Elementary School in Elmhurst, 58 of the school’s 448 students already were far away from their classrooms.
The parents of 23 of those students had filed written requests to Principal Ryan Anderson to take their children out of school early to start vacation, he said. While a handful of the remaining 35 absences called in that day were likely due to illness, Anderson suspected many were because the students’ families were kicking off spring break ahead of the school calendar, he said.
“It is very challenging,” said Anderson, who, along with other elementary administrators in Elmhurst School District 205, created a policy four years ago to discourage pulling students from school for vacation.
If a child is to miss school for a vacation, parents must write to the principal at least two weeks beforehand requesting the student be excused. Teachers will not provide missed assignments or homework until after the student returns, the policy states.
Other school districts across the Chicago area have tried similar measures to crack down on students who miss school for vacations.
In Homer Community Consolidated School District 33C, parents removing students for vacation must alert the office ahead of time, and even then the absences are considered unexcused. In Oak Park Elementary School District 97, in an effort to curb absences unrelated to illness, principals keep track of students’ missed days on a monthly basis and call home when attendance falls below 95 percent, school officials said.
But the efforts to discourage vacations during school time frustrate some parents who are trying to balance the importance of school with their own time off work, peak travel price surges and the belief that life lessons can be gained from travel and family bonding as much as the classroom.
“They’re not learning long division in kindergarten,” said Jen Gorlewski, a Naperville mother of three who said that while she and her husband hold their children’s education in the highest regard, they plan to pull their twin girls out of kindergarten in the fall for a family trip.
“Once they get to second grade, I would be a lot more careful,” said Gorlewski, who took the 5-year-old girls out of preschool this year for a family cruise. “But they’re going to remember these vacations forever, not whether they were at school on a Thursday or Friday.”
Some educators disagree.
At Young Elementary School in Homer Glen, Principal Michael Szopinski has become accustomed to parents requesting to pull their children out of school for trips to the Middle East, Mexico or DisneyWorld. While he tries to work with families, Szopinski said he knows the students will be missing out on valuable instruction time, even if they take reading assignments or write a journal during their travels.
“Many kids, they do need multiple times of practice from the teacher in order to understand certain concepts and skills. And when they’re gone, they lose those opportunities,” Szopinski said. “You can’t replace what you’re getting from a classroom teacher.”
Pulling students from school also takes away from classroom dynamics, which allow teachers to follow their pupils’ pace and adjust lessons accordingly. To assume a teacher can simply package up a week’s worth of learning is unrealistic, said Anderson, principal at Jackson.
“While certainly there’s a planning element to what’s happening in the next day or next week, it isn’t so exactly planned that teachers know exactly, precisely, the types of activities that are going to be done,” Anderson said. Packaging up homework “could be wasted effort and wasted time on the teacher and the children’s part.”
The State Board of Education leaves most of the debate up to individual school districts to navigate. The Illinois school code defines a student as habitually truant when he or she is absent without valid cause for 5 percent or more of the previous 180 regular attendance days — far more than typically involved in vacation absences.
In Oak Park, Superintendent Carol Kelley said making phone calls to parents whose children have missed a couple of days per month can be contentious.
“That has been met with some diverse reactions,” Kelley said. “There have been some principals who have been cursed out.”
Melanie Koreman, a mother of three from Frankfort, said she and her husband have pulled their children out of school for travel for more than a decade — and have been grateful that teachers have always been understanding.
“We’ve never once had perfect attendance. We love to travel,” Koreman said, adding that now that her eldest daughter, Bella, is in high school, they are more mindful about helping to make sure she is able to make up the work and not fall behind. But she remains an honor student, and the family is planning a ski trip this week.
“I’ve never once had a teacher that’s not encouraging about it.”
Meanwhile, in school districts without firm policies discouraging absences for vacations, parents continue to take their kids out of class when they see fit.
About eight years ago, Cathy Subber, a mother of two boys in Naperville, began allowing her sons’ grandfather to take them on a yearly trip in February. Subber and her ex-husband agreed that education is important and pulling children out of school is not for everyone.
But their sons were strong students who rarely missed class due to illness. And because their grandfather is in the pest control business, winter is the best time for him to take off work. The boys, now in eighth and ninth grade, cherish the traditional trip, which requires three days of missed school added to a scheduled long weekend.
“Their passports are filled up with all these different ports of calls and experiences and cultures, and really time with their grandfather that they wouldn’t normally get,” Subber said. “I just think that life experiences are important and that sometimes the pendulum swings too far on school and excellence in school as the top priority.”
Twitter @vikkiortiz
