[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by 1075guy

If this were my team, I would not have pulled the students for 2 reasons:

1) Their own parents drove them there. They're not technically there under school supervision, and therefore, its not the school's problem.

2) I would have let the students continue to compete, as that's what they spent 6 weeks preparing for, and its not fair to deprive them of that. I would argue with the school board about the asininity of their call later, and make sure the students didn't get into trouble.

It's nice to say that and we argued that as well at the time, but here are the facts:
1.) It is a school santioned extracurrullar event, and we live in litigation happy society so the school wants to cover it's butt in case anyone got into an accident going. The field trip was officially cancelled with school that day and therefore the were insurance issues with the stidents getting covered for injury at the event.

2.)It was a new superintendent of schools who didn't have an appreciation for the situation, of what the students did to get to this point. We were concerned he might try to retalliate against the teachers, and we could not get in touch with school board mentors in time that day, so in order to protect the teachers from retaliation we complied. The following week the school board did some dammage control for us, but we could not guarantee their buy in until after 5 pm on that Friday.

It's easy to say how you would act in this situation, but given the circumstances, and I'm not listing everything here, letting the students participate was not something that we could do.