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Comment by eznzt | Hacker News Reader

>The fact is, it's 2021 and people should care about what they do with their themselves, their family and their community first. And stop waiting for [... some other entity ...] to fix their problems.

From the other day:

https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/city-student...

>"He didn't fail, the school failed him. The school failed at their job. They failed. They failed, that's the problem here. They failed. They failed. He didn't deserve that."

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The article says that the kid was absent or late for 272 days in 3 years. That's over 50% of school days.

Regardless of whether the school had made the mandated phone call about absence issues to the kid's mother, "the school failed him" would not be the first phrase I would use to describe the situation. It's possible that the school did fail him; maybe he was bullied and going to school was unbearable! But if that was the case, I am surprised that a sympathetic article about the kid and his mother failed to mention it.

>No one from the school told France her son was failing and not going to class.

Honest question: are report cards no longer a thing?

An important reason it's a school failure story is that the 0.13 GPA all those absences earned him was 50th percentile (!!) at the school. In some sense the guy should have gone to class, but he's an impressionable high schooler, and it seems clear the school was setting an expectation that you don't really have to.

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