If you had a random six months of your education removed from your memory, how long would it take you to relearn it? If it was prior to high school, would you even bother relearning it?

How important is any particular six months of your education to your ability to do your current job?

Missing 6 months of school isn't ideal, but I think we tend to overestimate the importance of hitting every nail on the head when it comes to education.

Not to mention the fact that if most children in the US miss 6 months of school, they will have that as an excuse when they start sending out resumes in however many years.

Everyone's shitting on this dude but I had this exact scenario and I tie a lot of my struggles as a child student to this circumstance.

Miss 6 months of school while changing schools. Come in, I don't understand the math underlying what they're learning. I fall behind because I'm playing catchup while still trying to stay on top of new material. I have no discipline or direction from home so I don't put it any extra time or anything, I just get home and ride my bike around. This makes me hate math in general, and next year I'm still not entirely caught up or even sure of what I learned the previous year, so I'm failing harder. I don't know if there were any extra resources available or not, I was like, 13, but I was also a holy terror so I bet even if the resources existed they wouldn't have been provided to me because my poor performance was chalked up to me being a problem child in general - never mind my stellar performance in literature classes.

And so on. Throughout my entire public school career. By college I "get it" and am trying to catch up but it's already so ingrained in my personality that I'm "not a math person" that I instead pursue a useless humanities degree, then fuck around in Asia for a couple years. Then finally, at 26 years old, I genuinely get my shit together, learn what I missed 13 years prior, find out that I actually am capable of all that, and now I'm an engineer.

So, sure, do what you can to not get your kids killed, obviously, but I don't agree that it's fair to shit on this parent for worrying about what missing 6 months of school might do to their kid. I mean it sounds like they at least know more about discipline and enforcing learning on their kids than my parents did, so maybe the kid will be Just Fine, but homeschooling is no joke either, and the kid might still end up having to play catch up.

In most cases personal problems are the reason why children/young people skip school, not the result – that's why skipping school sounds problematic. But there are cases when it's entirely justified and it's entirely manageable then – surely an epidemic is one such case.

A proper justification, such as a closed school, would explain the delay in the child's education, and likely negate most (all?), negative reactions people might have about the resulting delay.

Citation may be needed in general, but here… that's sounds like a reasonable guess.

Are there citations for evidence of the opposite?