This Senior Missed Not a Day of School in 13 Years : Attendance: Gina Hernandez never ditched. Never slept in. Never stayed home with sniffles.

Gina Hernandez has never missed a day of school.

Since her first day of kindergarten 13 years ago at Port Hueneme’s Parkview School, she has never slept in, never ditched class to go to the beach, never even stayed home sick.

With her graduation from Hueneme High School less than a week away, the 17-year-old is the only senior this year in the Oxnard Union High School District, and possibly in Ventura County, who has had perfect attendance from kindergarten through 12th grade.

That’s 2,340 days of school, not including summer school.

“Everybody always said, ‘Gina, you never ditch school,’ ” Gina said Friday, the last day of classes for Hueneme High seniors. “I didn’t see any point in it. In Oxnard, where are you going to go?”

As a youngster, Gina said, she went to school every day simply because it was the thing to do, with no conscious effort to have perfect attendance.

The turning point came, she said, in sixth grade.

Gina’s elementary school friends had teased her that her attendance record would be ruined once she got chickenpox. No one, after all, goes to school with such a contagious disease.

So when her younger sister Jessica came down with chickenpox while Gina was in sixth grade, Gina demanded that her sister go to live with their grandparents for a week.

“She kicked her out of the house,” Gina’s mother, Jessie Hernandez, recalled.

Gina came down with chickenpox anyway. But she got it on spring break and by the time classes resumed she was recovered.

The timing, Gina said, “really freaked me out. Out of all of the days in the year, I got them on spring break. It was fate.”

Next to chickenpox, the worst illness she remembers having was a minor case of the flu during her sophomore year. The aches and pains lasted two days, she said, and they weren’t bad enough to keep her at home.

“Other students will come in with the runny nose, a bit of sniffling, the tissue always out,” Hueneme High business teacher Langdon Townesaid. “She’s always healthy.”

Although other schools around Ventura County have reported children who are completing sixth or eighth grade without a single absence, no county school district has a record of any other graduating seniors who have had perfect attendance throughout their school careers.

In some districts, officials said they don’t bother to track which students have attended school every single day.

Hueneme High School officials also typically pay more attention to students who have a habit of skipping school than to those who come every day.

But Gina’s perfect record prompted school officials to adopt a policy this week to recognize students with perfect attendance every semester from now on.

“The emphasis is on punishment,” counselor Marcie Duncan said. “Gina was kind of a motivation for us to realize we had no emphasis on reward.”

Schools need to reward good attendance, she said, because coming to school regularly is a habit that prepares students to be good employees after graduation. And before graduation, the students with perfect attendance are usually among those with the best grades, school officials said.

Gina has earned a 3.8 grade-point average out of a possible 4.0 at Hueneme High, even with the heavy load of Advanced Placement and other college-prep courses she has taken.

She began taking courses at Oxnard College last spring in order to get a head start on completing her college requirements and plans to attend the college full-time in the fall. She said she has not decided whether to get a business degree or become a physician.

Although Gina’s friends in elementary school teased her about her habit of coming to school every single day, some of her fellow seniors at Hueneme High said they view Gina’s perfect attendance record with a sense of awe.

“That’s impressive,” said 17-year-old Juanita Hernandez, who is not related to Gina, “that she could come every day, get up every day.”

When asked how many days she had been absent during her senior year, Juanita raised her hand and smiled: “Uh, oh,” she said. “Let’s not get into that.”