Point: Students should stay home from school when ill to prevent the spread of illness and to fully recover.

Elise Butler

Editor in Chief

Most St. Paul Academy and Summit School students have suffered through it at one point: feeling like the only healthy person in a school filled with sniffling, coughing, sick friends and classmates.

The winter months usually provide a prime time for illnesses to strike and it’s not uncommon to see many members of the student body, faculty, and staff working through an illness. But they should not be doing this at school at it is both harmful to their health and to other students.

Many students come to school despite illnesses because they are afraid of falling behind on work or missing important class activities. Walking through the halls when an illness strikes the school, it’s not uncommon to hear students say they have no choice but to come to school, that there are no other options. But if students are straining themselves while sick at school, they are not learning and they are not helping their fellow students.

Sicknesses drain students, both mentally and physically. If they are at school, they may be in class, but they cannot focus or take in any of the knowledge they came to school specifically to learn. If they focus more in class on staying awake, they’re not learning. If students stay home, they can rest and overcome sickness faster. Coming to school does not help them to get over their ailment, most likely increasing the time period over which they are sick.

They also have a high chance of getting multiple other students sick. In a close community such as a school, germs spread quickly. No matter how many times you wash your hands, cover your mouth when coughing, or use sanitizing lotion, it’s inevitable. There’s a reason sicknesses travel through schools at alarming rates, making it a worse overall experience for everyone involved.

Sick students should stay home and rest. They will recover faster and prevent other students from catching the same illness. The school’s sickness policy was written with students’ well being in mind and provides plenty of time for students to make up work or missed activities. Teachers get sick too, they understand the situation. They are accessible through email and are at this school because they care about the students. School is important, but the health of students comes first.

Ill students don’t want to come to school. Fellow students don’t want to get sick. It’s healthier overall for them to stay home and the school provides a fair sickness policy. Sick students choosing to stay home benefits all and makes for a better school environment.

Counterpoint: Students should try to attend school when sick to avoid falling behind on schoolwork and missing class time. 

Teddy Woodward

News Editor

Who among us can make the claim with clear conscience that he has never faked being sick to avoid a day at school?  The most widely afflicting “sickness” at SPA is the coupling of great academic pressure and a lack of scholastic preparation. Encouraging students to take sick days, while perhaps in the best of intentions, is an ill guided policy that will not be advantageous to the student body as a whole, but rather will inevitably be taken advantage of. This fact in and of itself is not all too troubling, but the potentially damaging habits which spring from this behavior are.

The student wakes to find himself unprepared on test day. Fearing a bad grade, he decides to pretend to be sick to give himself an extra day to study for the big test. He goes to school the next day, does well on the test, and sees no adverse consequences of his ploy. The school does not formally allow this behavior. However by making the act so easy, we implicitly condone the student’s actions.

From here it is a simple exercise in psychological conditioning. The student, hearing no complaint from administration, finds no flaw in his behavior and in fact finds only advantage. This will cause the student to repeat his behavior, and eventually come to see this course of action as a crutch to fall back on. Perhaps this works for high school and the student does well on all his tests. But, he has conditioned himself with a certain work ethic. Eventually, this behavior will come in conflict with the workings of the real world where excuses generally aren’t tolerated, and our student will finally suffer the consequences of his actions.

At SPA, we attempt to instill a solid work ethic in our students almost as much as we try to feed their intellectual curiosity. Let’s not undermine our own goals with overly lax policy.