Saturday school was common when I was in school a while back. A girl I rode with was late and I had to do it a few times. They even tried to hold my transcript and said I needed to make one up after graduating but they sent it anyway.

If you had to work you could get out of it that weekend. You’d still need to make it up and if you worked every weekend maybe you’d get another punishment.

They can be cooperative. I had to work M-F and weekends and they let me serve detention during active school hours, typically during lunch hours or a study hall block.

This is how we used to do it. Lunch or during a spare (unassigned class time) only.

I think weekend detention would feel like detention for the teacher/monitor as well.

Where and when I grew up, Saturday detentions were pretty common in high schools (don't know if they still are or for other parts of the U.S.). The movie 'The Breakfast Club' is based on Saturday detention. That gave me the impression back then, that they were pretty normal.

Most schools I imagine. Often, it's used for extreme truancy issues, i.e. in the State of Texas, you have to be present a certain number of days I believe per school year.

So Saturday detention tended to be a thing you'd get sent to if you had a truly outrageous number of absences.

I believe there was a way for situations like serious illness where this rule doesn't apply. But let's be honest, most situations of excessive absences that I saw back in High School were NOT that.

In that sense, your kid isn't really being "punished" by receiving Saturday detention. It's just, the school doesn't have to advance them to the next grade level either if they missed like half the school days for the year and are under the minimum attendance. Like it or not, education in the United States is compulsory and part of that is that there is usually some kind of attendence policy. If you don't like it, then you can homeschool.

Weeknights suffer from same issues tho