<p>Hi, I have been reading on this forum for a while, but this is my first time posting.
Sorry if the post is long, Please bear with me</p>
<p>In early October, our son suffered from two problems. One was a liver infection and the other one was a little more embarrassing/personal, so I will refrain from explaining. </p>
<p>He only missed maybe 6 days total, but all of October and up until now, he has been in pain and on powerful antibiotics. The medicine makes him unable to focus and he is constantly exhausted. As a result, he has been falling behind on school work and is generally performing much worse than he normally would be. </p>
<p>How do we explain this situation? Is it appropriate for the additional information section on the Common Application? Will it seem like he is just looking for an excuse for bad grades? Should we provide hospital records, etc.?</p>
<p>The school counselor has been awfully unhelpful with the situation and is claiming he is too busy to explain medical complications in his recommendation. </p>
<p>I was hoping some of the parents could provide advice. This is the first son we are sending to college and we just don't want to make any mistakes. </p>
<p>Thank you for reading, it is greatly appreciated</p>
<p>Call the principal of your school. This is usually something that is explained in the counselor letter. If your counselor is being less than helpful…go UP the food chain.</p>
<p>Good advice to contact the principal. (Also principals are usually the designated 504 plan person, which deals with health issues in school.) The school nurse can often be helpful as well.</p>
<p>Did the school provide any support for this situation? Did they organize his work for him during the 6 days he was out?</p>
<p>One of my kids has a chronic illness that meant months, weeks, days, or parts of days out of school. Our guidance counselor wrote about it, briefly, in his recommendation (but focused mainly on aspects of her separate from illness) and also the gc asked me to write a note that he included in the package.</p>
<p>You can handle this all sorts of ways, including a direct letter to admissions. I called admissions and asked them, and they were very nice. You can ask them what documentation they would like. I think we included a note from an MD that summarized her ailments, with the letter.</p>
<p>In the meantime, your son deserves some accommodations at school. This would include excused absences, extensions on work, extra help (possibly tutoring at home), information on assignments, class work missed, grades missing, and even testing at home. If he is really doing poorly, he could withdraw from the class and take it online later, in the summer, or in another semester.</p>
<p>If they are not being adequately helpful, think about calling an advocate or lawyer. That can be a positive step and is not necessarily adversarial. They will have ideas to help you, your son and the school come up with an effective way to deal with the situation, that assures your son a “level playing field.”</p>
<p>If you WANT accommodations for your son at school…you have to make a request for these accommodations. If they are health related, your doctor will likely need to write a letter detailing the limitations your son will have. The school will then consider these accommodations.</p>
<p>My D was out last spring before finals also with a liver infection–she missed state playoffs and about 8 days of schools at a critical point before finals. While all teachers were very accommodating with extensions, as well as sending her emails on class notes/updates, being out of school for that time hurt her grades that semester. That’s life, and frankly, it is only one small time frame of an overall high school record. Explanations from counselors sound whiny. Compmom’s facts sound different (chronic over a long time and not acute) and warrant explanation.</p>
<p>I disagree with erlanger, I think explanations from GCs usually sound less whiny than those from the student himself. If you want the counselor to include info in his letter it might be helpful, to write a short paragraph of exactly what you would hope he would say. </p>
<p>However since the GC seems reluctant, I’d use that last section of the Common Application to write a short explanation of what occurred. Something like “I was operated on x date and the subsequent recovery to full health took x weeks. During that period my grades suffered, but I am back on track now.” A separate letter from the doctor might be in order to corroborate the time generally required for being fully back in form.</p>
<p>I agree if grades are suffering you should get the school to give your son some temporary accomodations.</p>
<p>Why is the GC reluctant if this is a real medical issue? If there is documentation and the student usually does not perform in this manner, it is very usual for the GC to state so. This would need to be a medical issue that interfered with the student’s usual work…if the GC sees a doctors note and has some info from the school nurse, maybe that will help. OTOH, if the student was released to return to school with NO restrictions from the doctor, this might not be something the doc will be willing to write about. Call and ask.</p>
<p>Thank you everyone for the ideas, we contacted the school’s head of guidance, and she recommended that we explain the issue in the additional information section. She also said the “school normally mentions medical issues that are chronic/long-lasting problems” in counselor recommendations, but she would be willing to write a letter for us if necessary.</p>
<p>We just have a couple more questions, if that is ok.</p>
<p>Should we push for the school to write an explanation, or is the additional info section sufficient?</p>
<p>Is it fine if we don’t send a doctor’s note? We don’t want to put too much emphasis on the problem, because he should hopefully be all better by the end of this month. </p>
<p>How much detail should we go into? Do we provide the exact name of the complication? </p>
<p>The doctors note would go to the high school (in my opinion) to clarify the medical issues for those writing on your son’s behalf…NOT to the college.</p>
<p>Your child does have a right to privacy and the colleges do not need to know his medical condition specifically…they just need an explanation that will tell them that he has had a signficant medical issue that has interfered with his NORMAL school performance.</p>
<p>I would also have something included (maybe a reason to have the doctor’s note included) that states prognosis for future. Ie, full recovery, that will not be a problem in future studies etc if applicable.This is particularly true if there are not grades from a next period yet that demonstrate being back to full potential. And having something from the counselor/ and or MD is important so that it does not appear to be overcompensating explanation for grades etc that is not truly medical. (I’ve had parents ask me to give a child medical excuses for being out of classes for partial days for weeks, due to just a cold I’ve seen them 1-2 times for!! (denied of course)) If there is likely to be a need for further accommodations, it is only fair to the school to let them know if the student might need them, although that might fit better later on, in the medical form for the school. BTW, medical notes for this sort of thing, and for employers are SUPPOSED to state time of restrictions, what those are, effect on performance etc but not the diagnosis, or details of the disease, except as the patient requests those details to be included.</p>
<p>I don’t think it is necessary to send a doctor’s note. An explanation in the supplemental section will suffice especially if his grades were consistently higher in previous years. My D had a basic appendectomy and ended up having complications. She missed 10 days of school and it took another six weeks before she was functioning normally again. Although she made up the work her grades did suffer that term and she lost her momentum for the next term…so it was up from the “sick term” but still lower than her usual work. After that she regained her momentum and her grades were up to her normal…it did not impact the college process, she got in everywhere she applied.</p>
<p>While my child’s situation was chronic, some of the same principles apply. Chronic illness can be handled by a 504 plan, but acute problems are often not. Nevertheless, a doctor can document the problem and communicate with the school, and the student has a right to be accommodated. </p>
<p>In my child’s case, grades did not suffer. However, her attendance did, and, in some ways, her course selection suffered (she took a few online courses to provide more flexibility). She did not get any breaks on workload. So the note to colleges was not to explain a dip in grades, but to explain absences and course choices, basically.</p>
<p>My daughter was involved in a very bad accident a month before school got out her senior year. She had a TBI and was not allowed to return to school. Our hs has a senior service project that the kids can do the last month of senior year and they treated her missing that last month as if she was doing this. Her final grades were what she had at the time of the accident. Her GC included a letter with her applications explaining the situation and why her final grades may not have been indicative of what her true grade would have been.</p>