[Who dat?]

One was some bitch who denied a kid an absense to see his father leave for deployment. She "put her foot down" and said she'd give him an "unexcused absense" and that there would be "consequences".

Maybe they do things differently in Maine. At the schools I went to an “unexcused absence” was something you claimed but had no note to back up. So I could miss classes and tell the attendance office that it was because of a dental appointment, but had no note, and it would be unexcused until I could produce a note signed by a parent/guardian.

We always took notes explaining absences to the attendance office and they wrote the pass for the teacher. You didn’t take a note to the teacher, and the teacher didn’t know what the absence was for – just that it was excused or not depending on how the pass was written. Meanwhile, anything signed by a parent was considered “excused” when I went to school.

[zook]

Nowadays, at least in PA and I guess many other states, an "unexcused absence" is one that doesn't fall into any of the school's categories of "legitimate" absences. So, for example, if you send in a note saying that the child was needed at home, or was on a family trip, or had to go see dad leave to go to war, the school will count it as "unexcused." You see, now it's the school that does the excusing, not the parent.

It's BS, of course, and we've defied my daughter's school many times over this.