perhaps the stupidest dispute I have heard of in a long time

Chesapeake principal won't let mom pick up daughter


Posted to: Chesapeake Education News

• Login or register to post comments
  

myvid = "187845";
mypath = "/simpleview";











By Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer
The Virginian-Pilot
May 20, 2010

CHESAPEAKE
The mother scheduled a Wednesday morning doctor's appointment for her daughter.
Come Wednesday morning, the fourth-grader was taking a Standards of Learning exam.
The mother came to pick up her daughter.
The principal said no.
Rae Martin said she received the forms that asked her to not schedule doctor's appointments during SOL testing. But those were sent home shortly before testing was supposed to start, she said.
Meanwhile, her daughter Alexis' check-up had been scheduled for months.
When she arrived at Truitt Intermediate School to collect her, she said, she was told Alexis was in testing.
When she asked school officials to let Alexis make up the test, Martin said Principal Diane Watkins told her she could not. She said Watkins told her that her policy was that the classroom could not be disrupted during testing.
Martin insisted.
Watkins stood her ground - even when Martin called police.
Martin said she felt hysterical.
"She's not even mine right now, I have no control, no say," she remembered thinking. "I had absolutely no rights to her at that moment."
Alexis was released about 90 minutes later. By that time, they'd already missed the doctor's appointment. So her daughter went back to school.
School division spokesman Tom Cupitt said that principals encourage parents to keep their children in school during testing time.
However, "ultimately the parent has that right, to come in there and say, 'I need to get that child, and I need her now,' " he said.
He said Watkins was not facing any disciplinary action.

Alicia Wittmeyer, (757) 222-5216, alicia.wittmeyer@pilotonline.com

I think....
the school wildly overstepped their authority by refusing to release a child to a parent. It is not an argument about who had something more "important" that they wanted the child to do at that specific time. It is an argument of does a school employee have a legal right to hold a child against a parents will.
I think the officer should have charged the principal with kidnapping just to see how it would all play out.
From VA legal code.
18.2-47. Abduction and kidnapping defined; punishment.
A. Any person who, by force, intimidation or deception, and without legal justification or excuse, seizes, takes, transports, detains or secretes another person with the intent to deprive such other person of his personal liberty or to withhold or conceal him from any person, authority or institution lawfully entitled to his charge, shall be deemed guilty of "abduction

I think the school overstepped its bounds by refusing to release the daughter.

I also think the mother is an inconsiderate person for not keeping her daughter out of class if the checkup was so important. She gave absolutely ZERO consideration to her daughter's test performance or to the fact that interrupting the ENTIRE CLASS during testing is not helpful to the other students' performance.

That principal is lucky he wasn't delaing with my mom, that's all I have to say about that.

My mother is the reason girls were finally allowed to wear pants to school in our little town. They tried to send me home on a freezing cold snow day for wearing pants...and my mother came to the school...she won.