A sick policy

Until Mayor de Blasio said Wednesday that for the foreseeable future, health-related absences won’t be counted against students in competitive middle-school and highschool admissions decisions, the city’s educrats wouldn’t give a straight answer on what should have been an easy exam question to ace.

A city that has bent over backward to provide paid sick days to all types of workers, that has gone out of its way to say that students will get a free pass to miss school to participate in liberal protest marches, should never use health-related, excused absences to punish kids’ chances of advancement, not even when they’re applying to college. Period, end of conversation.

It’s long been a perversity of the current rules that while kids’ transcripts track when kids miss school, theoretically distinguishing between excused and unexcused absences, in practice schools with admissions screens rarely know the difference between days spent playing hooky and those spent in the hospital. Why not?

As a result, even when kids miss class for totally legitimate medical reasons — say, a bout with the flu or a broken arm or, God forbid, the need to get treatment for some serious illness — they might pay for it later on. Nonsense.

Better late than never, the fact that kids might miss school to self-quarantine or otherwise take care of themselves due to coronavirus, following doctors’ and politicians’ orders, places fresh focus on an inhumane policy. Now, whether a young person is out of school to treat or recover from influenza, irritable bowel syndrome or chemotherapy, they won’t have to worry about hurting their chances of getting into a selective middle school, high school or college.

Good. And idiotic that it came to this.