Thanks For The Education, Mike Rossi!

I’m really grateful for Mike Rossi, the dad who wrote an open letter to the principal of his children’s school detailing the educational value of his family’s vacation. You see, I’m taking my 14 year old son to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron this Friday. It’s our little tradition, a mom-and-son viewing of the newest Marvel movie… a tradition I’m going to milk as long as he’ll let me.

I was all set to accept the fact that pulling him out of school early to see a movie was most definitely going to be an unexcused absence. I mean, let’s be real. It’s fun! There’s no way it could ever be counted as an excused absence.

And then I read Mike’s letter. I now know that education isn’t just found inside the four walls of a classroom. It’s EVERYWHERE. Like, even in a movie theater.

Come on! When my son and I sit down in those cushy, reclining seats, it’s going to be practically the same thing as sitting at a desk. Professor Joss Whedon and the University of Marvel are going to school us, people. An educational smackdown from superheroes.

Thor! He’s all about that Norse mythology. Iron Man trains us in magnetic weaponry and also, a little bit of vulnerability. The Hulk? He’s basically a roided up Humanities lab…do we all have an inner Hulk? And why are we so afraid to admit it? Plus, Mark Ruffalo gives me a little Biology tutoring, if you know what I mean. And then there’s Captain America: a veritable history lesson clad in blue tights.

Afterwards I may take him to dinner at one of the nearby restaurants, all part of a new, upscale “shopping and eating experience” mecca recently built in our fair city. There, if we’re really lucky, we can put on our Jane Goodall hats and observe the species known as Middle Ageus Suburbanitus in their natural habitat, with the added outside influences of spring weather and alcohol. Can’t learn this stuff in a brick and mortar school, I tell ya!

Thanks to Mike and his heartwarming, only-slightly self-congratulatory letter, I now know that knowledge is truly in the eye of the vacationer. I mean, the beholder. I’m so empowered now, I bet I could make a trip to Target feel like a semester abroad.

In case you didn’t sense the sarcasm, I’m not a fan of the letter Mike wrote. And I’m even less fond of the reason he wrote it. He posted a picture of the letter from the principal, and in my humble opinion, it was a letter written in response to a prior inquiry. Given Mike’s apparent propensity to let the words flow like verbal diarrhea, and her sentence “the school district is not in the position of overseeing family vacations or evaluating the educational nature of a family trip,” it doesn’t take an academic all-star to figure out that he’d tried to persuade her to excuse the absences by telling her how educational their vacation was.

After getting shot down, he did what a rising number of frustrated people are doing now: turned to the Internet with his side of the story. And just like countless other open-letter writers before him, he managed to get the villagers all riled up, pitchforks and torches at the ready. Listen, can you hear them chanting “NOW THAT’S A GREAT PARENT” and “DAMN RIGHT NOBODY TELLS ME I CAN’T TAKE MY KIDS OUT OF SCHOOL”? Because they are. His letter did exactly what he wanted it to do: get a knee-jerk reaction.

Here’s the real deal, though. As parents, we can take our kids out of school whenever we want, for whatever reason we want. That’s your call. However, it’s up to the schools to discern between reasons which are excusable, and which aren’t. That’s their call.

According to Rossi, his kids have only missed one or two days of school thus far this year. With the family trip to Boston, that would make, at the most, four or five days absent, of which only three are (presumably) unexcused. Schools don’t generally send out this type of letter unless the student is close to the maximum number of unexcused absences allowed (usually between 8-10, of course this depends on the district).

He is well within his rights to plead his case, give a blow by blow (by blow by freaking blow) description of his trip and how much his kids learned.

The school is also well within their rights to say, “Cool story, Mike. But they’re still unexcused.”

The administrative officials of schools everywhere have tough jobs to do. They must keep an entire school running smoothly, and keep things fair and keep families happy. Imagine, for a minute, how many parents they have to deal with on a daily basis, how many different situations and stories and experiences they must handle. Now, imagine how many are like Mike Rossi.

I hope that principal isn’t getting too much crap. And if I lived anywhere near her, I’d take her out for a little lesson of my own: Martini 101.

Author note: I ended up getting tickets to a show after school, so no excuses needed for us. But I’m still going to enjoy Mark Ruffalo.

Jennifer Ball is a writer, a mom and a dog person. Her work appears sporadically on her blog, http://happyhausfrau.blogspot.com/. She is an exhausted single mom to four kids, all of whom tower above her now and eat like locusts. When not working at her full-time job or trying desperately to keep up with her t.v. shows, she enjoys drinking martinis and following fights in comment sections. Her bucket list includes getting a tummy tuck and having a celebrity retweet her. Find her on facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Happy-Hausfrau/128783067144996, on Twitter at https://twitter.com/happy_haus and on Instagram athttps://instagram.com/happy_hausfrau/. There’s also a really good chance you can find her at either Target or Costco.