WOODBURY — The cold winter months mean a couple things for schools, but one of them are skyrocketing absences. With student absences picking up due to illnesses, it makes missing school a lot harder.
“I think it’s definitely a little more difficult to catch up because you don’t get the same amount of time,” said Kyleigh Paige, a Nonnewaug senior. “You have to make your own time at home, which can be difficult if you have a job or play sports. Also, you have other work to catch up on from all other classes.”
Toby Denman, an NHS science teacher, says that when students miss school, they need to take the responsibility of gathering their makeup assignments.
“If somebody’s absent, they really need to be self-motivated to try and get caught up,” says Denman. “If it’s just a day or two that a student misses, hopefully that’s something that relatively easy, but when it’s an extended absence, that’s when it requires a lot of effort from students and teachers.”
With an extended absence, students sometimes seek some extra help with their work from their teachers.
“I think it can be easier when you actually have teachers that are actually willing to help you and stay after school with you and make time for you cause it definitely makes it go by faster,” said Paige.
Student needs after absences can vary.
“It varies class to class, but in the classes I teach, there’s a lot of content that we cover and sometimes you need to come in for extra help,” said Denman. “I’m glad that we have the Tribe and Focus periods to have that built into the schedule [which] helps gets students seeing teachers for help.”
Some students that are in more hands-on classes such as the ag classes seem to find it a little more difficult to catch up when absent from those periods. Every class has a different workload and different lesson that gets planned each day.
“I think it can be harder in ag because you do hands-on work so much, such as helping with the fence line or labs,” says Paige. “Like today, we did a lab that I would definitely not be able the catch up on by myself if I missed class, or tests can be really long sometimes, so that also takes a lot of time making it harder to miss ag classes.”
