LdiJ
Senior Member
I honestly get mom's gripe both about the situation. Its her custody day. She could have planned numerous different things for that day not knowing that the child was not going to be on campus...or she could have even kept the child home that day for various and sundry reasons and the child could have missed the trip entirely because she knew nothing about it. Or, there could have been a family emergency necessitating picking up the child early from school that day and mom wouldn't have known that the child wasn't there. There is also the point made that mom would have attended the field trip herself had she known about it.Get real - DAD signed a permission slip. DAD knew. That's all that's required (by law).
I get it - you're mad. I get it, there are tons of problems. What YOU need to get is that you are wrong in this particular instance.
While a teacher cannot be expected to know which days are custody days for a classroom of students, for each parent, grandma certainly knew that it wasn't her son's custody day. Grandma should have called mom and asked mom what she wanted to do. I think that the school was smart to suspend grandma from the classroom for a month, because she did open up the school for liability if something bad happened on that field trip. I would disagree with mom about keeping grandma out of the classroom permanently for this one incident, but it does appear that grandma oversteps quite a bit.
Hopefully the one month suspension will make grandma think twice about overstepping, and will keep the teacher alert to grandma's overstepping.
Personally, if I were a school administrator I would require the approval of both parents before I would permit any family member other than a parent, to volunteer in a classroom. It would avoid all kinds of problems that could be disruptive to the school.