Dead Girl Banned from Prom

[oldiebutgoodie]

Oh, I realize this was a piece of beaurocratic stupidity and nobody set out to intentionally harm the grieving parents of a high school girl who had been looking forward to prom, but still...

Letter shock for grieving parents

THE parents of a girl who died suddenly two months ago have been sent a letter from her school demanding she improves her attendance.

Signed by the deputy headmaster, the letter threatened to ban Megan Gillan from the end of year prom.

Her parents Mark and Margaret said they were `floored' by the letter from Macclesfield High. Megan, 15, was found dead in her bedroom on January 19 at the family home at Flying Fields Drive, in the town. The letter - dated March 16 - said `students must have at least 92 per cent attendance and Megan's is currently 60.4pc'.

Mrs Gillan, who works in A&E at Macclesfield Hospital, said: "I screamed when I first saw it. If they want her to attend that much I'll take Megan's remains. It's disgusting. Megan doesn't go to that school anymore. She's been dead for two months now so it's not surprising her attendance is low. I was pulling myself together to go back to work, but receiving the letter has just floored me."

“Megan would have loved going to the prom. She planned to go with a group of friends, she was really looking forward to it.”

MORE...

[MuffyBee]

It's really sad this happened.  Her poor, poor parents. 

[oldiebutgoodie]

It's really sad this happened.  Her poor, poor parents. 

It's devastating when a child dies because that's not the natural order of things. You feel like you, the parent, should have protected them or fixed the problem. My mother was devastated when my younger brother died when he was 23. She said, "It's not supposed to happen this way."

[nonesuche]

Actually this was a life event that was missed in the business requirements gathering for the system build for the school (s). Unfortunately the analyst(s) didn't capture that variance on the process so a feature to allow for a death report to be integrated into the system was missed.

It still doesn't mean that the school should not have formally apologized, it just means they legally could hand it off to the software company and I suspect that was indeed a legal maneuver.

Poor parents, what a beautiful daughter!!

[oldiebutgoodie]

Nonesuche, this would almost make sense if it was a large metropolitan area and a very large student body. Individual names do tend to get lost. If this was a smaller town or suburban neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else, there would be no doubt that school administration was aware of this girl's passing and at that point, removed her family's name altogether from any contact or mailing list and only contacted family for essential needs.

When I graduated from high school (June 1968), my graduating class was the largest graduating class in the history of the State of California -- I'm not 100% sure but I think we had roughly 1,800 students in my senior class. We held our senior prom in an old renovated airport hangar near LAX that had been turned into a restaurant/convention gathering facility. LOL, no nice cozy banquet room for us.

And even so, our school principal could and did greet every member of our class by our first names. He was out and about on campus every day, talking to students. He was awesome. He's the one who'd unlock the gate on Senior T.P. night to let us on campus after midnight so we could T.P. the school and take all the trash cans and make a giant pyramid of them on the gym roof and so on.

And all these years later, I remember that he knew personal (individual) stuff about a lot of us and he genuinely cared. We were a huge school with a huge senior class and if someone was in the hospital or if someone had died, I know he would have contacted the family to see what he could do for them.

I understand that in this story I posted, some clerk didn't delete the family name from the general mailing list and this is actually a non-story except for the "weird factor" of a dead girl being banned from a prom. I guess the real story for me is the insensitivity to the family. It wouldn't have taken a lot of effort to take a name off a mailing list. Certain circumstances (death, arrest, crime, etc.) ought to trigger certain other events like putting a name into a special category for special handling.