Vacation Policy at John Stanford

We receive many notifications throughout the year that students are going to be missing some days of school for family vacations. While we would love to have students attend every single day of school so that they can experience all of the learning experiences we have planned for them, we are cognizant of the fact that sometimes, despite your best efforts, family plans necessitate you taking your student out of school. We appreciate all of your efforts to keep these occurrences to a minimum.

However, if you do have a need to schedule a family vacation while school is in session, it is important that families know the policies that would apply in this situation.

According to Washington State Law:

1. Vacations and trips are not excused while school is in session. The only exception would be if the main focus or purpose of the trip is educational (ie. visiting colleges, serving as a youth counselor). This does not include family trips that include some educational aspects.
2. Absences in excess of 20 consecutive days may result in students being unenrolled from JSIS.

BLT in conjunction with teachers have also agreed on the following policies:

1. Absences for vacation will be entered as unexcused vacation in order to differentiate the absence from a more serious truancy concern.
2. JSIS BLT in conjunction with teachers, have agreed that teachers will not provide lesson plans, copies, upcoming assignments or missed assignments. Rather, teachers will provide families with an account of which concepts will be missed while their children are gone. It will be the responsibility of families to contact teachers to obtain this information and to make sure that their children work on the missed concepts.
3. Absences for small day or half-day trips that have an educational purpose and focus (singing in a choir, community service etc.) will be excused.

As always, please make sure that you notify the attendance line at 206-252-6084 or email at
jsis.attendance@seattleschools.org whenever your child is absent so that we can correctly enter the
absence into our system. Thank you for your cooperation. If you have any questions, please contact
our office.