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Oregon just told its students that a mental health crisis counts the same as the flu when it comes to missing class.
Governor Kate Brown signed House Bill 2191 into law in June 2019, rewriting Oregon’s school attendance rules so that mental and behavioral health sit on equal footing with physical illness as an excused reason to stay home. The law takes effect for the upcoming school year, meaning students walking back into Oregon classrooms this fall will be the first to use it. It didn’t come from a task force or a superintendent’s office — it came from a group of teenagers who lobbied their own state legislature.
- House Bill 2191, signed by Gov. Kate Brown, lets Oregon students use excused absences for mental and behavioral health, capped at five excused absences within any three-month period under existing state attendance law.
- The bill was written and pushed through the legislature by high schoolers in the group Students for a Healthy Oregon, led by recent Sherwood High School graduate Hailey Hardcastle and fellow activist Derek Evans, with support from Sam Adamson, Lori Riddle, and Dr. Robin Henderson of Providence Health & Services.
- Advocates cited data showing youth suicide is now the second leading cause of death among Oregonians ages 10 to 34, while national suicide rates have climbed to 50-year highs.
A Law Born From Student Advocacy
Hailey Hardcastle and Derek Evans didn’t set out to become lobbyists. Both were still in high school when they helped found Students for a Healthy Oregon, the coalition that drafted and championed HB 2191 in Salem. Evans has said the group drew direct inspiration from the youth-led gun control push that followed the 2018 Parkland, Florida shooting — proof, in his view, that teenagers testifying in person to lawmakers could actually move legislation, not just headlines.
The bill wasn’t an abstract policy exercise for the group. Organizers have said the campaign was conceived in memory of a student who died by suicide, giving the effort a personal weight that carried it through committee hearings and floor votes until Brown’s signature made it law.
The Numbers Behind the Push
The statistics the students brought to Salem were the crux of their argument. Youth suicide has become the second leading cause of death among Oregonians between the ages of 10 and 34, and advocates paired that in-state figure with a national one: U.S. suicide rates have hit their highest point in 50 years.
Youth suicide is now the second leading cause of death among Oregonians ages 10 to 34.
That’s the backdrop Dr. Robin Henderson, chief executive of behavioral health at Providence Health & Services, pointed to when lending clinical backing to the bill. For readers tracking why depression and anxiety diagnoses keep climbing among teenagers, the broader research on what’s actually driving those numbers is worth a look, including this breakdown of what’s fueling depression and anxiety.
Mechanism of the Policy
Mechanically, HB 2191 doesn’t create a brand-new attendance category — it expands the existing one. Oregon law already permits students up to five excused absences in a three-month window; the new statute simply adds mental and behavioral health to the list of acceptable reasons, alongside physical illness, medical appointments, and family emergencies.
Hardcastle’s argument for why that mattered was blunt: students were already skipping school over anxiety, depression, or burnout, they just weren’t allowed to say so. She’s pointed out that plenty of kids were already calling in with a fake fever or a made-up headache when the real issue was something psychological. Formalizing the excuse, in her framing, doesn’t create new absences — it just stops forcing students to lie about the ones already happening, and opens the door for parents, teachers, and counselors to actually talk about what’s going on. Readers looking for grounded strategies on managing that kind of daily stress can find more in InfoSearched’s mental health coverage.
Pushback and the Case for Parity
The bill didn’t sail through without resistance. Some lawmakers and critics raised the standard objection: give students an inch on “mental health days” and some will use it as a license to skip class with no real justification, and the real world, they argued, doesn’t hand out mental health leave the way it hands out sick days for a cold.
Supporters pushed back on that comparison directly, noting that standard workplace sick leave already covers mental health absences in most jobs — the “real world” argument, they said, was actually an argument for the bill, not against it. Advocates maintained that the risk of a handful of students gaming five excused absences a quarter was far outweighed by the benefit of normalizing conversations about depression, anxiety, and stress at an age when, according to the numbers advocates cited, those conditions are proving fatal at an alarming rate.
Oregon’s law is now on the books, but the test starts this fall, when the first wave of students actually uses it — and when Hardcastle, Evans, and the rest of Students for a Healthy Oregon find out whether other statehouses are paying attention to what a handful of teenagers just pulled off in Salem.
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