Allow Athletes to Do Makeup Work

* I appreciated Adrienne Mack’s article on attendance problems in the Los Angeles public schools (Oct. 17). It was good to see some of the progress at Canoga Park and Birmingham high schools, for example.

Mack has been instructed to “give students a chance to make up work that they miss during any excused absence,” but she doesn’t say if she does this for the athletes in her Period 5 class.

Teachers who don’t do this create tremendous problems at the high school level--ill feelings, coach-teacher-administration conflicts, student-teacher conflicts. Does Mack feel the same toward students who are absent for other activities, such as drama, music, journalism? Ideally, every student should be in or have a co-curricular activity. It might even make them want to come to school, which is what athletics does.

DOUG MacKENZIE

Glendale

MacKenzie is a former high school football coach.