Any advice? I have been told don’t let her attend a religious preschool because that sets a precedent.

So, assuming that mom wants to send the child to Catholic schoo at least in part for religious reasons, what we really have here are two parents’ constitutional rights clashing. Even if a court agrees with dad on what the law is, one of the parents will end up having his or her rights violated.

To those who are commenting, here are some facts related to the case. The child in question has attended Catholic school for all of his 9 years in the education system. Neither parent has money problems so tuition is not the issue. The father has attended many events at the school and church, including the child’s first communion. The father celebrates Christmas, and had no objections to his son attending Catholic school until the last year or so. The father’s newly discovered atheism is being utilized as a cudgel to promote his own agenda, not meet the needs of his child, who has attended the same school with his friends for all these years and now is in danger of having to start all over at a new school. He was looking forward to his high school experience. Before you jump on the “kids are resiliant “thing, remember, the family is not moving, nor is money an issue. So, in the name of political correctness, and the separation of church and state, this father is waging a public war without regard for his child. If he has so little influence over this child’s thoughts, maybe he should try listening to what they are.

If that is true then he’s being very selfish. If the son wants to stay in that school then he should be able to. I really hate it when parents drag their kids into their own issues….

Does anyone, especially a divorced parent, know where the law tends to fall in cases where one parent wants X and the other wants Y? My guess is with the custodial parent, and generally that seems to be the mother, though apparently the tide is changing with that…

As to what schools are better, I went to public school and I think I generally met a wider range of people than my friends who went to private schools (or boarding schools) but I am not sure who was better prepared for college. Oh, and I had a Catholic school friend who wasn’t allowed to wear pigtails because they were deemed an “obscene hairstyle”. True story.

Furthermore, public schools waste so much money on lost causes, funding programs for kids who have no desire to be active in the academic environment nor continue their schooling.

That makes me a little uncomfortable. I don’t know if students that don’t respond to traditional teaching methods should be referred to as “lost causes” though I get where you are going with that. At my public high school, we had options for students who wanted to work, giving them shorter days, and we have auto classes, cosmetology, screen printing, and all sorts of other stuff. Some of those people left high school with marketable trade skills, and had careers before us college-bound kids found our dorms.

I’ll agree that not everyone fits into the traditional school experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything wrong with those kids, and it might mean there is something wrong implementing a school program that is designed to meet the needs of only certain kids.

I’m not surprised. The dirty secret about private schools is that they can screen their student body, which a public school can not. They can screen out the riffraff, behavior problems, and–people with LD’s like your kids.

One thing neither mentioned was how long ago this divorce decree was, so it’s possible things could have changed since then. The kid is now going into high school, so that’s a different school right there. It could be that neither mom or dad wanted to switch him out of the school he was going to at the time of the divorce and stress him out more, but now that he’s going to a different school anyway, dad is revisiting the judge’s decree.

I don’t think we know enough to say, as you did, that “it’s all about what the father wants and the mom doesn’t get her say”. All we do know is that there is a law, it’s on the side of parent who objects to the fact that it’s a religious school, and there is no mention of the mother contesting it. Although that may just be because she hasn’t gotten her own lawyer yet…

And as for the other thing you mentioned, “Her constitutional right to exercise her religion doesn’t matter?”, this isn’t about the kid’s religion, it’s about his school. She can still drag him off to church every single day (or take him there because he wants to go, who knows?), regardless of where he goes to school.

I am the first to admit I don’t have a lot of experience with child custody cases and divorce hearings, but it seems reasonable that if children of divorcing couples are attending private school, the judge would be inclined to include provisions to continue the existing schooling in the divorce settlement. That was my assumption anyway.