children out of school in america - University of Tennessee Digital ...

awake until morning when the sounds of boys talking
and laughing startled him. The two boys sharing his
tent had discovered the wetness. They hounded Dale
mercilessly and he wept. The boys told the counselors,
who lectured him. Later, someone cracked a
joke about Dale's accident and all the boys exploded
with laughter. Humiliated, he wanted to run away
and dreaded the thought of returning to school. The
third night he remained dry but the damage had been
done.
Dale never told his parents about the incident. He
refused to go to school for two days and pretended
he was sick. But by the end of the week, his sister
had become the butt of other children's insults about
Dale, and she reported the incident to her parents
who were painfully embarrassed and angry with Dale.
Two weeks after the excursion, the principal of
Dale's school asked his parents to come in for a
meeting. The principal wasted no time outlining the
seriousness of Dale's situation, for the boy as well as
for the school. The problem was not, he explained,
the other children. "They'll probably forget the
whole thing in another week or so. It's Dale's teachers-how
do we know he won't just, you know, pop
off at any time in one of his classes?" Mrs. Mc­
Cutcheon explained that it was only a nighttime
problem but the principal replied, "We can't take
any chances. I can't stop him from going to school.
But I can stop him from going to this school and
that's exactly what I'm doing. The boy's out for a
month, or until a time you can prove to us that he
is able to control himself, night and day."
And so Dale was out of school.
"What do we do?" Mrs. McCutcheon asked over
and over again. "They don't want him and there's
no way of knowing how long he'll be like this. I've
read books on it. Everybody says it disappears. But
when's that going to be? How do we know he might
not be too old for school by the time he's cured?
What's going to be worse for him, being a bedwetter
or a boy without a proper education? You think
people like Dale's principal ever think of that?"
Betty, 10, and Kathy, 1'6
Betty and Kathy live with their parents and two
other siblings in a low-income housing project in
Portland, Maine. Betty, the youngest, has heart
trouble. She is often so sick she has to remain in
bed. She is scheduled to have open heart surgery,
but the Maine Medical Center has so many children
on the waiting list "they don't know when they can
operate." During the 1972-73 school year Betty attended
fourth grade a total of only 22 days. However,
she was promoted to the fifth grade. No school
officials ever visited her mother to inquire about
Betty's high absenteeism, and no tutor was ever provided
by the school, even though Betty is 10 years
old and sometimes bedridden.
Betty's sister, Kathy, met with a totally different
school response to absenteeism from the principal of
her high school. Kathy often had to stay home to
help with Betty when she was ill. She missed quite
a bit of school as a result. In March, the principal
told her to quit. He said to "stay home for the rest
of the year and come back in September" to repeat
the 10th grade.
Kathy plans to return to high school and make up
the year, but her mother worries whether she will be
able to. Along with caring for Betty, there are the
numerous school fees a high school student must pay
which the family cannot afford. Kathy's mother told
us "if they don't pay towel fees, for gymsuits, library
fines and lunch money by the end of the year they
don't get a report card and aren't allowed to pass to
the next grade."
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