overbearing parent

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Home : 2004 : March : 18

overbearing parent
By Exasperated Teacher

I need to vent before I get to school today. I have a student in my class who is supposedly allergic to milk (I say supposedly because although he brought a note to school saying he was allergic to milk, he eats an ice cream
several days a week, and he eats cheese - mom says he's not allergic to ice cream or cheese - just milk). Mom insisted that the child be given an alternate drink at lunch. Every day the child stands there while the cafeteria workers go back to the kitchen to get him a juice (which stops the whole lunch line). On Monday I noticed that the student hadn't drank his juice. I asked him

about it and he replied, "Oh, I throw it away - I don't like juice." I told him if he was just going to throw the juice away, he should get a milk and put it in the free milk bucket (children at our school who don't drink their milk put it in a bucket of ice for kids who would like an extra milk for free). Yesterday when I got to school there was an email from the mom raging at me because I told her child to get a milk. She said a milk was not to touch her child's tray. She said he was "entitled" to that orange juice and it was "his right" to throw it away if he wanted to. She said her husband did not want him contributing free milk to other kids.

I wrote her back and told her I was sorry about the incident, but it was just how I was raised. I try to teach the children to not waste any things. She wrote back wanting to know if I thought she was a bad parent. She then said she was raised the same way, but this was a matter of her son getting what they paid for, and if her son wanted to throw the drink away it was okay. She then said she had already gone to the principal about the incident. She ended by saying she was not mad at me, thought I was a great teacher, blah, blah, blah; and she hoped I was not mad at her.

Number one - we are in a Title 1 school with federally subsidized lunch. The milk that comes with lunch is paid with federal school lunch money, which is shy the school requires every child take a milk, whether they are going to drink it or not. Number two, I was doing my job. If a kid in my class bought an ice cream and threw it away without eating it, I would get on to him for wasting his parent's money.

I really just don't get some of these parents! And I am really, really ready for this school year to be over. I want desperately to move up to middle school, where the parents aren't interfering with everything a teacher does, but looks like I waited too long to put in for a transfer. Every year the parents get more sue happy. Seems every time you discipline a kid in our school, the parent is up there threatening you. We can't teach properly because the behavior of kids is so bad. I have several in my class that disrupt my teaching all day long, but if I get on to any of them, their parents are at the school comlaining. What is WITH parents today?