Just heard back from the school principal...

[samshane]

Before I bought the airline tickets - I just wanted to make sure the principal was okay with the kids missing school. I had a feeling it would not be an issue, but I wanted to make sure everything was okay.

She was out yesterday, so the secretary suggested I e-mail her... she sent me a nice e-mail back telling us to have a good time and that our family time was a priority. And that my secret was safe with her - LOL.

So now I feel everything is good... I wanted to be respectful to the school and their policies, as well as have a the kids have a fun reunion with their dad (who is just as excited to go as they are) - and I feel I have worked everything out.

Now onto buying airline tickets!

[The Hendies]

We always had a pretty positive response from teachers when we took our kids out of school. I know some people have met with a lot of resistance. That said, our family is still very close...why? I can't say for sure, but I think that spending time together, working together through thick and thin, and keeping traditions even when they got older helped! Have a great vacation!

[DisneyFamily123]

I don't understand why parents have trouble getting their kids out of school to go to Disney World. If a public school gave parents a hard time, I'd suggest the parents promise to withdraw the child(children) from school with a plan to home school, then re-enroll the child after vacation. I'd think most school administrators would be more agreeable than to have to deal with the paperwork involved in withdrawing and re-enrolling.

[ms_missy66]

I wish our school would give us a blessing.

DisneyFamily123, I think it's easy to say you'd (not specifically you, just anyone) do that, but when your school has a super strict attendance policy, it's a meaningless threat unless you're really planning to homeschool. We took our daughter out for 4 1/2 days when she was in kindergarten. She had zero other unexcused absences and only 2 medically excused ones.

We were promptly called in for an attendance intervention meeting, told if she had any additional unexcused tardies or absences in a 12 month period from this meeting, we'd be dealt with at the district level. If there were any others beyond that we'd have to appear in family court.

We took all the proper steps. We told the teacher 2 months in advance. We notified the principal 6 weeks in advance. The trip's purpose was to spend time with my parents. My dad, who was ill, passed away three months later. :-(

I think the policy is ridiculous, especially when I hear virtually everyone else talk about how lenient their policies are. I wrote the principal a note about how stressful it made the rest of the year for us (and continues too through January). If you needed a doctor's note for every time your child is sick, you (I) send your child on occassions when you would have, otherwise, kept them home because they aren't quite sick enough to run to the doctor. And God forbid that kid needs to poop when you're just about to leave. There's an unexcused tardy that escalates the situation. The whole thing made me so upset. With that all said, though, I wouldn't dream of saying "Fine, then I'll homeschool." It just seems like doing that would have sent a message to my kiddos that following the rules is a choice or, if we continued to go to school there, created an adversarial relationship. I don't know...neither seems worth it.

So now we're bound to vacationing during the peak seasons like everyone else. It bums me out, definitely. But short of being offered some all-expense paid trip to a one-in-a-lifetime location, we won't do it. We already have our WDW trips booked for the week after Christmas, Spring Break and June, after school lets out. I dread the crowds, but we've been so many times before that we don't have too long of a "must do" list. We just enjoy what we can.

Whenever someone talks about pulling their child out of school to travel, my biggest advice is to talk to the teacher/principal BEFORE putting money down on anything non-refundable.