Guides › Liability
Who signs when the student is a child
Everything a school asks a student to agree to — the waiver, the photo permission, the cancellation policy — runs into the same fact: the student is six. The agreement has to come from an adult, and which adult is not always obvious.
What follows is general information, not legal advice. Who may consent on behalf of a child, and what a school is expected to check, varies by state and by situation; your attorney is the person to ask about yours.
Ask for the relationship, do not infer it
The adult who brings a child to a martial arts class is frequently not a parent. Grandparents do a great deal of the school run in this trade. Step-parents, older siblings, childminders and neighbours all appear at the door.
A form that says “Parent's name” and a box gets filled in by whoever is standing there, and now your record says a thing that is not true. A field that asks what their relationship to the child is costs nothing and makes the record honest.
Two parents, one enrollment
The common case that software handles badly. One parent enrolls, pays and signs. The other wants to know when Thursday's class is and whether she went.
If your only options are “full access” or “nothing”, you will end up either giving the second parent the billing screen or answering their questions by phone forever. Neither is right. The schedule and the attendance are a different thing from the card, and they can be given separately.
When the two adults disagree
It happens, and it is not a software problem. A school's position is much stronger when its record shows who enrolled the child, who signed what, and when — and stops there. Deciding which parent is entitled to what is not a judgement a class register should be making, and a school that tries usually ends up in the middle of something it cannot win.
The practical advice most attorneys give is to keep to the facts you recorded and to ask for the paperwork when a situation calls for it.
The child's own view
Worth a sentence, because it is easy to forget in a discussion about consent forms. A child old enough to have opinions has them about being photographed and about being pushed to grade. Nothing in the paperwork captures that, and the school that asks anyway is the one parents recommend.
What this means for your website
The booking form asks who is signing and what their relationship to the child is, rather than assuming a parent. The record keeps what they typed.
A parent's personal link shows every child in the family and the billing; a second adult can be given a link that shows the schedule and attendance without the money. Which one a person gets is a decision you make, not a setting they discover.