Tax on vacations during school time?

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Is this just a tax on the wealthy in the UK? Would we ever allow this erosion of parental rights here in the United States? As disruptive as it is to learning, I don’t think that we would use a tax.
EXCERPT:

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3481717.stm

Parents ‘ignore holiday fines’
**One in five parents say they will carry on taking their children out of school for holidays despite new £100 fines. **

From the end of the month head teachers will be able to fine parents who take their children out of school for holidays without authorisation.

But 18% of parents questioned in a survey for Teletext said they would ignore the penalty.

Four out of 10 said it would be cheaper to pay the fine, because they could save much more by booking a holiday outside of peak times.

More and more parents are taking their children out of school for holidays and the government wants to clamp down.

But many parents say they cannot afford to pay peak-time prices.

The poll, for which 500 parents were questioned, found that one in five parents had taken their children away during term-time for two weeks or more last year.
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Parent Penny Harrison is taking her two children away skiing in term-time. “The flights are only £50 return - you can’t even get down to London for that,” she said. “However, £100 fines might make me think again, that’s quite a lot of money.”
 
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Fitz:
Is this just a tax on the wealthy in the UK? Would we ever allow this erosion of parental rights here in the United States? As disruptive as it is to learning, I don’t think that we would use a tax.

Maybe not a tax, but prevent them from moving on to the next grade, yes. In the thread
“Gay Days” at Santa Rosa High , kmktexas said that her district has a policy where an absense of 3 or more days without a medical escuse means you don’t get to move up to the next grade. I did a quick google search, and it looks like a fair amount of grade schools have similiar policies (athough not as severe as her district).
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Lance:
I hope no one in the Illinois legislature hears about this. 😃
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Hi Lance, you are so right. We would find a way to use the money for education, right? Just like our so called lotto money!
 
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Almeria:
Maybe not a tax, but prevent them from moving on to the next grade, yes. In the thread
“Gay Days” at Santa Rosa High , kmktexas said that her district has a policy where an absense of 3 or more days without a medical escuse means you don’t get to move up to the next grade. I did a quick google search, and it looks like a fair amount of grade schools have similiar policies (athough not as severe as her district).
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Hi Almeria,

I was going to chime in on this. Thanks for setting up my post. 🙂 It isn’t my district but the one where my neices attend. It is the one “two over” from my own. The reason for all of it is that the school funding in Texas is tied to days that the students are in attendance. Any time a student is absent, the school gets less money. I would rather pay a fine than be blackmailed with my kids’ education. My kids are in Catholic school and this was no small factor in our decision (though not the main one).

My husband’s family all lives out of the country. Any trips to visit tend to be expensive and longer. They don’t alway correspond to the school calendar. In the school district that I mentioned, there are many immigrant families who face the same problem when they want to visit family in Mexico. The families are “counseled” to formally withdraw their children from the school and re-enroll then when they return. This way they don’t show up as absent.

In fairness to the school system, the third day makes it an unexcused absence. Zero unexcused absences are allowed. But I haven’t ever heard of them actually keeping a child back for only one unexcused absence but in my sister’s case, they sure threatened to. She wanted to take the girls out to attend our other neice’s First Communion and they would have missed 4 days.

But to the original point, yes, this is a horrible errosion of parental rights that most people don’t even know about and it is happening here too.
 
The article said that they do get 10 days off without the penalty. Do any of you actually ever keep your kids out more than ten days in a year, unless there is a medical reason? Ten days is a fairly long vacation, since every month here out kids get at least one day of vacation due to holiday. Attach the ten allowed and who would need more? Don’t they get those perks in the UK, like we do here?
 
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Fitz:
Hi Lance, you are so right. We would find a way to use the money for education, right? Just like our so called lotto money!
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The lotto did educate all of us in Illinois. We now know to never ever believe anything the Illinois legislature tells us. If the Illinois legislature gets any money at all they will find some boondogle program to spend it on, mean while our infrstructure is falling apart, our schools are failing and the state is in debt.
 
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