By Natalie Bartlett, LPC, CFI

A school bag, lunch box and folded jumper laid out on a kitchen counter ready for the morning.

Every co-parenting coach sees the same calls in September. The school year is the part of shared parenting that nobody plans for properly. The custody schedule gets negotiated in detail, often with lawyers, and then September arrives and none of it covers who signs the permission slip.

I have worked in the Colorado family court system for twenty-six years, as a licensed counselor, a court-appointed investigator and a co-parenting coach, and a surprising share of the disputes I see started with a form. Not an argument about values. A form that one parent did not know existed.

Here is what to settle before term starts, and what to do when the other household will not settle anything.

What a co-parenting coach tells every parent to do first

This is the single most useful thing and most separated parents have not done it.

Ask the school office to record both parents separately for the newsletter, the parent portal, the attendance notifications, the medical alerts and the emergency contacts. Not one household address with both names on it. Two entries.

Schools generally will do this and often have simply never been asked. Until you do, you are receiving the school year secondhand, and secondhand information in a tense co-parenting arrangement becomes a dispute within about three weeks.

Decide who does what before term, and put it in the parenting plan

Four things cause nearly all of it:

Who signs permission slips. If both of you sign different ones, the school ends up adjudicating, which they hate and are not equipped for.

Who pays for what. Trips, uniform, music lessons, the photo package. Where it is unwritten, the parent who was asked first pays and resents it.

Who attends parents’ evenings. Many schools will offer two separate appointments if asked early. Asking in October is easy. Asking the week before is not.

Who handles sickness during the school day. Whoever is listed first gets the call. Decide whether that is right, and what happens when that person is in a meeting.

If you have a parenting plan, this belongs in it. If you are redoing the schedule anyway, this breakdown of the common custody schedules covers which arrangements absorb a school year most easily.

The homework problem, and what belongs in the parenting plan

Two households, two sets of rules, one child who has worked out that the rules differ.

You do not need identical rules. Children handle different expectations in different places perfectly well, which they already do between home and school. What they cannot handle is being asked to adjudicate between them, or hearing one approach described as wrong.

What helps is agreeing the minimum: that homework gets done in both houses, and that the reading book travels. Everything beyond that can differ without harm.

When the other parent will not engage at all

This is where most parents give up and stop trying anything, which is the wrong conclusion.

Do your half anyway. Being on the school’s list does not require the other parent’s agreement. Attending your own parents’ evening appointment does not either. A great deal of what matters here is unilateral.

Ask the school, not the other parent. If you cannot find out whether the trip was paid for, the office knows. Going through the school rather than through a conflict removes an argument from your week.

Keep it factual and keep it dated. Not a file to use against anyone. A simple record of what you asked and when. If this ever does reach a court, a short dated list beats a long account of how it felt, every time.

Get help with the part that is not about school. If the same four arguments recur every term, the problem is the plan rather than the term. A co-parenting coach works on exactly that, and it is a different kind of help from therapy.

Do not make the child the messenger. The temptation is enormous when the other parent will not reply. It puts a child in the middle of an adult problem and children who carry messages for long enough stop reporting accurately in both directions.

What a co-parenting coach says children actually need

Not two parents who agree. Something smaller and more achievable: for the school part of their life to feel like one continuous thing rather than two competing versions of it.

That means the reading book travels. The PE kit is where it should be. Someone turns up to the assembly. The child is not asked to explain one household to the other.

A child whose parents are in open conflict, but whose school life runs smoothly, does considerably better than a child whose parents are superficially polite and whose school bag is a weekly crisis. The second is within your control. The first often is not.

What to do now, before term

Four things, none of which need the other parent’s cooperation:

Call the school office and ask to be added separately to every list.

Put the term dates, the inset days and the parents’ evening in your own calendar, from the school’s website rather than from the other parent.

Decide your two or three non-negotiables for the year and let the rest go.

Write down, once, who is responsible for what, send it in a short message, and keep the copy. If there is no reply, you have still established what you proposed and when.

A note on the longer game

Parents in difficult co-parenting arrangements often treat each school year as something to survive. It is worth noticing that a school year handled calmly is also the most persuasive record you will ever build.

Not because anyone is keeping score. Because the picture that emerges, over a year, of a parent who was on the lists, knew the teacher’s name, turned up and kept the child out of the adult disagreement, is the clearest possible answer to a question anyone might later ask.

You are not building it for that. It is just what being on the lists produces.

Natalie Bartlett is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a court-appointed Child and Family Investigator in Colorado, with twenty-six years in the family court system.