Dateline: 06/20/97
A month or two ago our son came home from school with his report card. We noticed that in the parent/address spot only my other half's name was included. Since we had both signed and filled out all the various and sundry documents for the school at the beginning of the year, we knew that this was merely an oversight.
I had to call the school on another matter, so as an afterthought I broached the subject, "By the way, you need to add my name to my Daniel's records." The response was swift, and to the point, "I don't think we can do that." My response was equally swift, and rather pointed, "Oh yes you can."
And so, we were instructed to call one of the many Vice-Principals (and since when did schools start to follow the trend of naming scads of Vice-Principals?). T called the VP's office as instructed, and the conversation went something like this:
T: Deborah's name needs to be added to all of Daniel's paperwork.
VP: We can't do that.
T (who can be as pointed as I can): Yes, you can.
VP: Well, uh, well...
T: Deborah is his step-parent. You need to add her name.
VP: Well, we could if you were married. But you can't just call somebody a step-parent.
T: Oh! If that's the only problem, then there's no problem! We are married!
VP: That's illegal.
They went back and forth a bit more, T trying to educate the VP on matters such as religious vs. civil marriage and the inequities involved in the treatment of our situation contrasted to the treatment of many similar step-family situations in the school, all to no avail. The VP closed by saying that the "rule" was School Board policy.
Mind you, our biggest concern wasn't whether my name was on that one piece of paper, but my lack of official status meant that I could not call the school and identify myself and get information about Daniel; I could be potentially unable to have Parent/Teacher conferences with Daniel's teachers without Therese being present; I couldn't go to school and pull Daniel out mid-day if there was a need to do so.
The story does have a happy ending. I called the School Board which said, "There's no such rule, call the Ombudsman's office." I called the Ombudsman's office where I was told "There's no such rule, let us get with the school and work something out."
When we finally spoke directly with the school Principal, she was very forthcoming and helpful, "There's no such rule, our problem is that the antiquated software we use doesn't allow for a secondary name without some title. We didn't want to call one of you 'Mr.'", let's figure out what we can do.
We smiled, tossed my JD degree figuratively in the air, and said, "Do feel free to use 'Dr.' as my designation."
All in all it turned out all right. We worked past the blowhard non-caring middle-management lackey type person, and dealt with real people who cared and were willing to work with us to find a resolution.
However, we live in Los Angeles and we're lucky. People don't look at us in shock at schools or soccer games or Little League games when we show up obviously a couple and obvious co-parents.
This topic deserves much more than a cursory overview, so I'm going to be talking about this for the next few weeks. We'll talk about the various resolved and pending cases regarding child custody and the state of the laws across the country. We'll also talk about raising a child in a gay/lesbian household - and I'll be screaming about the "Lesbian Mothers" group we joined for one meeting, never to return after hearing so many of them say, "Well, we didn't let the school know because we wanted to make sure that our kids got in."
In Pride,
Deborah