Seems to me we used to get Thursday and Friday off on Thanksgiving week. Then our standards started to slip. Some schools announced that they would be taking off at noon on Wednesday. Getting ahead of the traffic to Grandma’s house seemed to be the rationale these slackers cited. But you know how it goes with slipping standards. All of a sudden there were a rash of schools that decided they would shut down for all of Wednesday, as well as the actual Turkey Day and Friday.
Then the inevitable: let’s just shut it down for the whole week. Did I hear someone refer to “the slippery slope”?
Thus it is that many of you (most?) will not be working at all next week. So I’m not going to do the Daily Dawg next week. And since we are all now already anticipating that week off, I’m providing a short entry for today. Short but sweet, with a familiar message: BE REASONABLE.
It involved a cyber school in Pennsylvania. The court held that the school was not required to provide homebound instruction. Indeed: homebound instruction in the context of a cyber school is hard to wrap one’s head around. But the rationale for the court’s decision was the unreasonableness of the parents.
The student’s guardian sought homebound instruction and produced a recommendation of this from a psychiatrist. When the school sought consent to talk to the psychiatrist for more information and clarification, the guardian refused to provide it. The court took this into account in ruling against the guardian. If the parents want the school to consider a recommendation from someone outside of the school, such as the psychiatrist in this case, it’s very reasonable for the school to want to talk to that person. It looks unreasonable when the parents block that conversation.
That one is Price v. Commonwealth Charter Academy Cyber School, decided by the federal court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on August 13, 2019. We found it at Special Ed Connection: 74 IDELR 286.
DAWG BONE: LET’S GO HOME, WATCH FOOTBALL AND EAT. AND EAT. AND EAT.