Children try to avoid school for various reasons. So when Reddit user kissmegoodbi had missed class for an entire month, the main office got suspicious.
Even her mom, who repeatedly reassured them that her daughter was, in fact, ill couldn't convince anyone.
So when the administrator threatened the family with social services, the woman decided that enough was enough, put a mask on her child, and took her to school with a highly contagious disease. She didn't think anything else would suffice.
Years later, kissmegoodbi remembered the story and recently told it to the subreddit r/MaliciousCompliance. Here's how the entire thing played out.
After a month of absence, her school didn't believe this girl was actually sick and threatened her mom with social services
Image credits: Kelly Sikkema (Not the actual photo)
So the woman took the child to class with a highly contagious disease to prove it
According to Mayo Clinic, whooping cough (pertussis) is a respiratory tract infection—in many people, it's marked by a severe hacking cough followed by a high-pitched intake of breath that sounds like "whoop."
Before the vaccine was developed, whooping cough was considered a childhood disease, but now it primarily affects children too young to have completed the full course of vaccinations as well as teenagers and adults whose immunity has faded.
Deaths associated with the disease are rare and most commonly occur in infants. (That's why it's so important for pregnant women and other people who will have close contact with an infant to be vaccinated against whooping cough.)
Image credits: Kelly Sikkema (Not the actual photo)
Image credits: kissmegoodbi
As absurd as this particular case sounds, absenteeism is an issue in many schools.
"Students who are chronically absent—meaning they miss at least 15 days of school in a year—are at serious risk of falling behind," the U.S. Department of Education said.
The numbers for the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) were drawn from nearly every public school in the country and revealed that over 7 million students missed 15 or more days of school in 2015–16. (That's 16 percent of the student population—or about 1 in 6 students.)
Although "unacceptable levels" of chronic absenteeism were found among all students, compared to their white peers, American Indian and Pacific Islander students were over 50 percent more likely to lose three weeks of school or more, while black students were 40 percent more likely, and Hispanic students were 17 percent more likely.
"Research suggests the reasons for chronic absenteeism are as varied as the challenges our students and families face—including poor health, limited transportation, and a lack of safety — which can be particularly acute in disadvantaged communities and areas of poverty," the U.S. Department of Education added.
Different countries tackle this problem in different ways. Parents in England, for example, are being hit with an increasing number of fines as schools try to discourage children from missing school.
The number of non-attendance fines being handed out dropped off during the pandemic, as self-isolation rules and lockdowns led to millions of children learning at home, but there has been growing concern since it was revealed that almost 1.8 million children regularly missed school in the first term of this academic year.
As part of a mission to tackle this, parents have been fined £3.7M ($4.4m) for the school year so far, according to figures obtained by the BBC.
People had a lot to say about this ordeal and many of them shared similar stories of their own
As for whooping cough, we are still trying to eradicate it.
In fact, UK scientists are offering to pay people £3,775 ($4,500) to get infected with it as part of a vaccine trial.
Britons are being urged to take part in the study that would see them deliberately exposed to the bacterial infection after receiving the jab—they will then be monitored in a hotel room for 16 nights, where all their meals will be provided, to see how their condition develops.
The University Hospital Southampton are recruiting healthy 18 to 50-year-olds who live in the city to test the new nasal spray vaccine called BPZE1.
Even though a shot for whooping cough already exists, it cannot stop upper airway infections and does not prevent people from spreading it to others.
