When Billy Rinehart walks the graduation aisle Friday, he will have completed 15 years of school €“ without missing a day.
Rinehart, 18, has made it through two years of preschool at Little Promises, seven years of kindergarten and elementary grades at Holley School, two years at Sweet Home Junior High and four at Sweet Home High School without being absent for any reason. That’s over 3,000 days without a miss, if you’re counting.
“Actually, I just don’t get sick,” he said last week. “I have no reason to skip. I could go fishing with my friends, but I might miss something.”
Rinehart is the son of Cyndi, the secretary at Crawfordsville School, and Tom Rinehart. He has an older brother, Robert, two older married sisters, Kathy and Heather, and two younger brothers, David, a junior, and Donald, a sophomore.
Billy and his mother said the family is generally pretty healthy.
“We don’t get sick. It’s weird,” he said. “My dad only got sick one time. Mom never gets sick.”
Cynde Rinehart said most of her kids had perfect attendance through elementary school, the one exception being Robert, who missed 16 days in the sixth grade when he came down with a bug.
“Then junior high and high school came along.”
She noted that Donald, her youngest, is on track to perfect attendance too.
“School is important, just like a job,” she said. “You show up every day for work and you’d better be dying if you don’t.”
Billy said he’s pretty much liked school throughout, but he thinks he enjoyed the intermediate grades the most.
“They all had their ups and downs,” he said. “At the junior high I had a lot of time to hang out with my friends and it was a transition period from elementary school. The high school was the same except it’s a larger school.”
He said his parents haven’t been overly strict about his attendance.
“They obviously want me to go to school but they don’t say ‘Go to school or you’ll be punished.’ My parents are kind of laid back. It’s not like I was pressured to go to school. I actually like it. I’m going to miss high school.”
Rinehart said he’s enjoyed hanging with his friends “and I love the free lunch. I don’t like mooching money off my parents.”
He’s also enjoyed being a member of the high school Game Club, which recently won second place in a competition for game research and design. Rinehart said members had to design a game in which characters fight an evil company that’s trying to take over an alien planet.
“It was pretty much how creative you were,” he said. “We made everything in the game ourselves. Other kids took stuff from other Web sites.”
However, he said, “the sad thing is that I die in the end €“ or rather, my character dies.”
Rinehart said he wants to design games in the future and plans to attend Linn-Benton Community College in the fall to get his prerequisites, then transfer to Oregon State University to major in computer science.
He’s never taken a computer class in high school, but he did enjoy science and math, he said.
He’s always hated English, but he said his current teacher, Johnathan Bonner, makes it “fun.”
All he has to do is pass.
“It’s down to crunch time,” Rinehart said.
Cyndi Rinehart suggested that maybe her son is just “too ornery” to get sick.
“I imagine when Billy was little the teachers wished he would miss school,” she said. “He was full of beans.
“Now, if we can just get him to pass his English class, life will be good.”