First Posted: 3/19/2015
SPENCERVILLE — Eighteen-year-old Jordan Wagner hates school, with a passion.
To him, it makes much more sense to be outside or working, something’s he’s done since he was 9 mowing yards and shoveling snow until about his freshman year when he started washing hog trailers, as well as a tree company.
These days, his day starts around 2:45 a.m. as he heads to work at Strayer Hog Farm. Working at least three hours before school, he helps to load hogs. Then, after school through a work-release program, he goes back to work driving tractor-trailers and returns home later at night, sometimes between 10 and 11:30 p.m.
Working at the farm for the last four years, along with two others, it’s any wonder how the teen would make it to school on time. However, Wagner hasn’t missed a day of school in 16 years — beginning with preschool — nor has he missed a day of work. The same is true for his involvement in extra curricular activities, such as Boy Scouts, of which he was a member for two years.
According to his mother, Jayne Wagner, even times when her son was sick he would still go to school and work, no complaints. This includes a time during his sophomore year when he needed a lung biopsy.
“He would not miss school because he had a goal to graduate with perfect attendance,” she wrote. “He needed the biopsy in October but made the doctors in Ann Arbor wait until Christmas break.”
The teen was in the hospital at Ann Arbor, Michigan, for two days, by the time doctors took out his chest tube, he was able to get back to school right on time.
Wagner explained the goal was more of a duty.
“I never like to miss anything,” he said. “I always just showed up.”
His father, Duane Wagner, said he and his mother are excited to celebrate his award for perfect attendance after he graduates high school in May.
“We’re extremely proud,” he said.
