A stone's throw from the Central School in Arvika lies the municipality's school attendance team with its two apartments. Here are hearing protectors and screens between desktops. In a single room, a student and special educator sit in conversation and in the kitchen you can cook your own food to catch up on home schooling.
Here, students who for various reasons will not be able to participate in regular teaching. Over the past two years they have received about 40 young people and although there are no exact statistics on how many students it is about, special educator Maria Persman feels that it is a growing problem, and that it affects people of all ages.
- We've had kids here from middle school and we see that it's creeping down the ages, she says.
Similar to fatigue syndrome
The root causes can be different: stress, pressure, bullying, depression. However, the symptoms are similar to one another and usually appear as anxiety and anxiety that have become so severe that the pupil no longer goes to school. In the end, they have stayed at home for so long that the step back into the school world becomes almost impossible.
"The difficult thing is often to know if the anxiety and anxiety have made them stay home or if it has been the opposite, that the anxiety and anxiety have come when they got home," says Maria Persman.
She compares the mood of home-sitting students with adult fatigue syndrome. An adult who has gone into the wall gets sick leave and can get back to work by gradually and slowly increasing the work rate. Students at home often have the same needs.
"The most important thing is not to lose contact with the school, so you always have something to go back to," she says.
Lock in
Sometimes it has gone so far that the attendance team has to make home visits.
- Then it may have gone so far as to actually lock the door when we arrive, so that you can talk to the student through the door and start building a relationship there instead, says Maria Persman.
How can you as a parent notice if your child is at risk?
- In the early stages, it is always that you start to be at home a little neighbor, we often talk about litter absence. But what I think you should pay most attention to is the stomach and headache because that's almost how it begins.