Maternity leave sought for teen girls

[UGAalum94]

Originally Posted by AKA_Monet

The reasons why the schools probably will not allow students to repeat or retake classes is because it is costly to remediate.

In the districts where I've taught, kids can keep taking classes as many times as they want to until they get credit or until they turn 21, I'm pretty sure. There's absolutely no cost to the kid for classes taken during the regular school day and year or for going back for a fifth or sixth year of high school.

At my school if a young women got pregnant and didn't want to or couldn't return quickly, she could take whole year of maternity leave and just come back the next year in the fall. (Her parents might have to pretend they were home schooling to avoid truancy laws if she were younger than the legal drop out age, which I think is 16, but the school system wouldn't do anything punitive to her.)

AGDee, I don't want to punish them, but I don't want to increase the cost and burden of their education to other people. If a girl could do four weeks of homework independently at home and come back ready, I'd be all for giving them the time off, but I know from working with our homebound teachers that that never happens in our district. The kids struggle to do the assignments without direct instruction from a subject area teacher and when they come back, you basically have to reteach them everything they've missed. Why not give them more time off and just have them repeat? Or if they did understand all the work, do credit by examination for the course?

I understand what you are saying about interruption in school, but I also know that giving any high school kid a month off is a pretty big interruption anyway.

And it's been my experience that I've never had a super academically motivated kid in high school who had a baby while in high school. It's not a question of ability; they weren't dumb, but they weren't the kids who were going to do four weeks of work on their own. Heck, if I had a baby, I doubt I'd be as interested in anything other than the baby, either.