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Originally Posted by Usually Lurkin
you can't say "HAS to be ignored" then say "THEN maybe an exception gets made" You have to consider exceptions differently than if the dad had some other job. Whether or not an exception would apply in this case is a different question. But you can't ignore the dad's job. A large part of the military issue is that the government ("we") sets the schedule of when he can call. The same government ("we") sets the schedule for when the kid can answer his phone. If those are in conflict because our government is too large to coordinate schedules easily, why give the kid 2 days worth of suspension?
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It HAS to be ignored, because you can't provide a black hole of a cateogry of exceptions based on a parent's active military service. It would be untenable to the system.
What is more, it is far from clear that the federal government-military-we was actively constraining the father's calling schedule. It could just as easily have been a matter of the father's personal convenience.
Also, conflating the federal government-military-we and the local school district- high school-we into one 'we' entity and expecting them to coordinate calling schedules for individuals within the respective WEs is: 1) a contrivance; and 2) an impossible contrivance. Which is why the one HAS to ignore the other.
16 year olds may not be smart enough to use cellphones responsibly in an educational setting, but they are plenty smart enough to play the system. Even worse when they get a parent with a sense of entitlement backing them up and stirring the pot. A 16-year old may not be mature enough to be expected to understand why this kind of disruption can't be allowed, but they're not so immature that they can't be corrected.
The 2 days' suspension was not just for this isolated incident either. It was taking into account a pattern of rules violations and disruptive behavior. In that light, I would consider it more than fair.