High School students are regularly stressed and overworked. They have homework from their classes, a job if they’re old enough to, family issues, and extracurricular. Students have so much on their plate and they are not allowed to have a break. Schools in Utah and Oregon have already allowed students in their schools to take off of school for “‘physical or mental illness.” Carter High School students agreed that high school students should be able to take days off for mental health reasons, as long as the students do not abuse the privilege. High school students should be allowed to use mental health issues as an excusable reason to miss school, considering all the stress they are under. Allowing students to use mental health issues or illnesses as an accepted excuse to miss school may help improve the students’ current mental state. A day of rest and additional time to work on homework would really help someone manage the stress from school, work, and life in general. Currently, one in five teenagers have a mental illness of some type and allowing mental health to be used as an excuse to miss school may help the teens. This would also prevent a student from getting burnt out from all the stress. Allowing the student a time of rest would help them avoid this side effect of stress. As a student, I have recently experienced burnout. I was unable to go to school or work for four days. It was caused by the stress from work, marching band, and my classes. Allowing students to take off for mental issues would allow for a cool down time so the student would be ready to work the next day. Their grades would improve and they would miss less school. In addition, allowing students to take off for mental health shows that the school cares for the students’ mental health. Students wouldn’t feel like robots, working until they break. Instead, they would feel human. They would feel cared for in the sense of their mental health. Unfortunately, many people may argue that mental health as an acceptable excuse from school would be too easy to take advantage of. You cannot see a person’s mental health, therefore someone could easily fake a mental illness and use that as an excuse. This can be easily avoided. Using mental health to miss school would not be an unlimited excuse. There would only be a certain number of excusable absences from mental health allowed per semester. This would prevent someone from always missing school due to mental health, unless they are in a mental institute or any other doctoring facility for mental health. This is the perfect solution to the worry of students abusing the privilege of mental health days. Overall, mental health as an excusable absence for students is vital and necessary to help the students in their schooling and mental health.
Carter Corps News 