.         I’ve come to school sick. Your friends have too. And obviously that kid that sneezed on you in the hallway, he’s definitely sick.
.         Now pause and think for a minute ( if that’s too much work, don’t worry, I already did it for you). You’ve come to school sick, gotten other people sick, and subjected them to the same suffering you had to go through.
.         WHY DID YOU DO THAT?
.         Students at Westfield are feeling the need to come to school sick.
.         Reasons I’ve heard are “my teacher’s really mean,” or “I’m going to fail the test,” . . . or “I don’t even know what unit we’re in, and neither does my teacher, so I’m not even going to be able to find out what we did.”
.         Those are just some examples, and they are usually followed by a lot of concerning jokes, which explains the back of the students IDs. Also guys, let’s stop being mean to teachers.
.         When asked if she feels pressured to come to school sick, Soph Lamy, 10, replied “I mean there’s some classes where I really feel compelled to come because or else I feel like I would never catch up and there’s like an unreasonable pressure to show up . . . I feel like if I don’t come to school, I’m going to die.”
.         I feel like that too, but there are some people who don’t. And by “some”, I mean like six people in every grade. And for some reason, those six people per grade are the only people the admins are listening to because everyone’s acting like everything’s fine. This is not fine. I can’t come to school without getting serenaded with other people’s coughs and sneezes. ( I’m not making fun of anyone, don’t fight me ).
.         “Genuinely, I feel like if I’m sick, I’d much rather rest and stay home than like torture myself even more,” Iniya Mahendiran, 10.
.         . . . Wow, good job bro . . . no, but honestly, let’s all try to be like that because the way half of the student-body is coming to school right now with acute bronchitis is diabolical and off-putting.
.         “I do get annoyed, but, the thing is, I respect that they’re coming to school to learn because we go over lots of material during the school day,” Aarush Kotla, 10.
.         That’s a pretty good point. Sometimes, you just have to be at school. The work for AP classes is hard, even when you are at school for the lesson. Chemistry’s just hard, no matter what type you’re doing. And school gets a lot harder when your teachers can’t even tell whether or not you were sick, or you were just sick of being there.
.         Some students feel like it’s super important to come to school on test days, even when they’re sick.
.         And then, there’s the other type of student, the one that’s perfectly healthy, who doesn’t study, skips, and then leeches off their friends who have already taken the test. To no one’s surprise, they get an A when most of the class gets the minimum grade given and a bomb dropped in SIS.
.         “Sometimes, over the course of the year, we start to see patterns, y’know sometimes students are missing more consistently on days that there’s assignments due or something that’s major,” Brigid Duffy, English Teacher, “. . . But, we know students are doing the best they can and if they aren’t feeling well or they feel like they need to stay home on a day that something major is due, there’s probably a reason behind that, and that would be a good conversation to have together rather than just accusing someone of something.”