&gt; the unreasonableness of the school making middle schoolers travel to a competition at 5:15 on a weekend morning<p>This could just as well be &quot;the unreasonableness of signing on for an activity then not wanting to do what&#x27;s required to participate&quot;, and&#x2F;or &quot;the unreasonableness of signing up for more activities than one is (apparently) able to find time for&quot;. I thought she <i>wants</i> to participate in choir. I&#x27;d certainly get up early on the occasional weekend for something I wanted to do, and it wouldn&#x27;t even occur to me to complain, ya know?<p>As for letting her leave early, 1) they probably don&#x27;t want to safely coordinate a bunch of individual pick-ups in an unfamiliar place _while trying to keep everyone else on schedule_, and 2) they may consider sticking around for the rest of the event to be important. It&#x27;s really, <i>really</i> easy to imagine a world in which their refusal isn&#x27;t primarily due to their being assholes.<p>Maybe you&#x27;re right about all this being an example of a hostile school, but your description of events makes it seem more like a case of whiney, entitled kids&#x2F;parents. Again, maybe that&#x27;s wrong, but that is <i>definitely</i> the impression I get from this tale, as written. I mean, this: &quot;Yet, the choir forces kids to show up at 5:15 am (!) on a Saturday&quot;. I actually LOL&#x27;ed at the parenthetical exclamation point. Or: &quot;<i>and also</i> do all of her regular class homework (which is already a lot in its own right).&quot; I mean—yeah, of course. What&#x27;s weird about that? Quit signing up for extra crap if you&#x27;re having trouble meeting basic obligations. You <i>cannot</i> have&#x2F;do everything.