WOODBURY – Along with every winter season, flu and sickness fill the air. The most dreaded being the flu, COVID 19, and RSV. What comes with these common viruses is a lot of valuable school time gone to waste.
School nurse Sandy Snabaitis constantly treats students throughout the day.
“I would say probably about 20-25 kids leave school per week sick with a nurse dismissal, about 5 come in per day saying they’re not feeling well,” said Snabaitis. “I would say around 30 people call out of school per day for different reasons: absence, medical, injury, and just being sick.”
The school keeps track of how many people call out per day, which tends to have a big difference during the flu season.
“Last Friday we actually had 29 people call into the attendance line that morning to say they were not coming,” said Snabaitis.
Students can miss out on school for long periods of time with a sickness.
“For me it depends,” said NHS sophomore Timothy Romaniuk-Chan, “it could be 2-3 days mainly with a stomach bug, and a week because of the flu.”
When students are out for periods of time with a virus they miss valuable school time. During this time they miss multiple papers, tests, and homework.
Many students agree that it’s a struggle to make up for these missing assignments.
“I think missing school from a virus can cause me to miss work I don’t even know is missing until the grade is too late to complete,” said Ryan Schieffer, a junior at Nonnewaug. “Especially paper stuff, it can really screw you over if it happens to be a quiz.”
Not only do students notice the difficulty, teachers do as well.
“I think that when students are missing school it can be difficult to make sure they get caught up,” said Joshua Kornblut, science teacher at Nonnewaug. “Oftentimes students will be absent from school and not check in with their work. It’s really important for students to take responsibility for their work.”
But, unfortunately, for students, making up work in science can be harder than the rest.
“The biggest struggle as a science teacher is when they miss labs because they can’t really make those up,” says Kornblut.
With that, the amount of sick students in each class is alarmingly noticeable.
“I notice that every class has at least one kid sick, ” said Romaniuk-Chan
But according to Kim Gioia, a teacher at Nonnewaug, missing the work isn’t the only issue as it’s not just students, teachers can also be affected by missing school.
“It affects me in many ways,” said Gioia who runs the NHS’ SCOPE program. “I feel like I begin to fall behind in correspondence, lesson planning, and connecting with my students.”
