Every student at San Luis Obispo High School gets sick at least once in their high school career. When people are sick they tend to want to stay home, considering they don’t want to go and expose others to the sickness, but it is highly frowned upon for students to miss school in general. Most students feel if they stay home, they’ll end up with an excess amount of work, which puts even more stress on the student. This problem is unfair.

  Students should be able to stay home when they aren’t feeling well without feeling stressed for what’s to come when they return to school.

  Most students, like junior Mary Pinzon-Betancourt, feel that they could miss school, but are wary of the dreaded make-up work.

  “I feel like I can stay home, but when I do I end up having a large workload which is what keeps me from staying home,” said Pinzon-Betancourt.

  Junior Amanjeet Kaur Thandi stated that she believed that sometimes students should take the time to get better at home as well.

  “It depends. If I have a big test in one class then I’ll go, but if it’s just another normal day then I don’t see the big deal,” said Kaur Thandi.

  Students should be able to miss school when sick. Now the question is, how can students and teachers improve how to get the missed classwork made up?

  Obviously, teachers can’t stop teaching for one student, but they can give them time to adjust to their workload and understand that they probably have a lot of other make-up work in other classes as well as theirs. Currently, the schoolwide rule is that a student gets the same number of days as the number of days absent to make up excused work. Just giving a student an additional day to work on an assignment or an alternate assignment can do wonders for their stress levels.

  Senior Gabi Dilka agrees that time and patience is key when working with absent students.

  “I think we should be given more time to turn in missing work so that they don’t have to go through all that stress,” said Dilka.