The Dangers of Ditching

Seniors Emma Clouse and Kimia Nader walk to their cars after their first periods on Senior Ditch Day. They would join the many other seniors who ditched school after only attending a few of their classes.

By Benjamin Baek

HUB Reporter

            First period starts and students straggle into their classrooms, but notice there is something different about the class today. They look around at other fellow students with the same confused look and after some thought, they realize what is missing: the seniors.

It’s Senior Ditch Day, an unofficial holiday where most seniors “ditch” by coming to school for only a few periods and then leaving, or just not coming to school at all. Instead they go engage in other less-than-academic activities ranging from spending the day at Lake Berryessa to taking naps at home.

“Senior Ditch Day is kind of like an unspoken holiday where seniors just get to have their own little day off to do senior stuff,” DHS graduate Emma Clouse said. “We just go around wherever we want to go for the day and it’s a lot of fun.”

Clouse also said that almost all seniors engage in Senior Ditch Day. “Only the seniors who need to make-up assignments or just raise their grade stay at school. It’s not too common though.”

But Senior Ditch Day is not the only time students ditch school. Many students ditch during the school week for many reasons. For senior Taeksang Yoo, some classes, like his networking class, are actually worth ditching.

“While the teacher lectures and teaches regularly, his presentations/lectures are uploaded onto a website that any student can access,” Yoo said in an email. “I can just access all the learning material at home.”

Although ditching is not uncommon at DHS, continual ditching, or chronic absenteeism, is becoming more frequent in schools across the nation. According to a report on absenteeism in public schools, “The Importance of Being in School,” by Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes in May 2012, up to 7.5 million students miss a month of school each year.

And ditching doesn’t just blemish attendance records. According to the same report, data recorded by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University “have consistently found chronic absenteeism to be among the strongest predictor of dropping out of high school, stronger than even suspensions, test scores, and being overage for grade.”

DHS grad Elizabeth Kubey also sees these negative effects of ditching. “Usually people will ditch if they haven’t completed the assignment that’s due in class, but you end up getting more and more behind when you miss class, which causes you to ditch more and so you’re just constantly behind in school,” she said.

But not all students look at ditching as totally negative. Junior Rachel Baek sees some benefit to not coming to school. “I can understand why people would ditch a lot,” she said. “Everyone’s had those personal issues at home or just life problems when they just don’t want to go to school. And just ditching one day isn’t the end of the world; you can still catch up.”
Ditching is not for everyone, though. Some students, like senior Anny Huang, choose not to ditch. “There have been times where I really want to ditch because I have all these things due, but I can never bring myself to do it.” she said. “I flip out even when I can’t go to school because I’m sick!”

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *