Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I just feel so sad reading this.

I know the article mostly talks about the mom's perspective and the school's perspective, but the tragedy to me here is that the kid is the one that truly suffers from neglect. Nobody seemed to even notice that he missed 272 days of school, they reached out for one parent teacher meeting. What psychological effect does it have on the kid that none of the adults really kind of notice when he's out of sight and out of mind?

And multiply that by who knows how many kids are skipping school just in that school without teachers even noticing, occupying some no-man's-land where they're just sort of on their own with an impression that no grown ups really care.

What's that kid's attitude going to be in life? Does he even know what opportunities may have been robbed from him?

The really sad thing is that this child was in the top half of the class rankings. You can imagine the bottom half probably never made it to class. This is endemic for city schools.

According to the school, they place an automated phone call every time the student is absent so, supposedly, they got 272 phone calls notifying them of absences.

Yeah, this never would have flown at my high school. My school's secretary personally called my parents the first time I ever missed a class with an unexcused absence, and that was a single class, not a full day. At the very least, after the first few unanswered automated phone call, a human follow-up should have been made.

Even at a nice high school you may be getting an automated phone call.

I skipped a ton of highschool. With a single parent that works all the time it's easy to make sure they never get the message ;)

Yeah well that seems like a beautiful cover your ass excuse "our robot contacted them 272 times, so our work was done" – ok well did anyone check to see what's going on with a kid who's missed that many days? did anyone check to see if the mom even picked up the phone? or if the number was valid?

The school might not have had a correct phone number on file.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com