Longer than a comment should have been...became a post

Thanks for the response.

Sadly, in our jurisdiction, truancy is now ENTIRELY the parents' problem. The schools are required to have a certain number of teaching hours, but, the students are not required to attend. However, if they don't attend, they don't pass and the parents have failed to fulfill their responsibility of getting them there. (I.e. I can't pass it back to the school and truancy officers.) I can email the social worker (whom I believe wouldn't appreciate a skip-day) and try to make her get involved. There are also supposed to be people she can refer us to...in fact we were told that the referral had been made, but, we haven't heard from anyone.

I do agree with you about the control issue, though. We've tried very hard to give her lots of control over things, but, she's having a hard time seeing it. I think if I were to do it all again (which I'm sure I will someday) I'd start with more rules so that it would be easier to relax them. Instead, I feel like we have to pull them in...after all, when we said that she could be in control of things we qualified that she had to make sure school happened.

I do like the idea of thinking of chores as something to earn though.

And, I think that the planned skip day (perhaps with my DW since my work would not appreciate it) would likely scare her into wanting to go to school. (She's not such a big fan of spending time with us -- she'd like to ignore our presence.)

She says she likes the cat, but, she's been ignoring him tonight too.