Okay, so, let me see if I have this right.

Mom is a SFC (Sergeant First Class) in the Army. She is deployed to Iraq. Son is in school in one of the schools right off post at Fort Benning, GA.

There is approximately a 9 hour time difference between Iraq and Georgia.

Having run a facility that housed the local ATT phone center, I know how often they work, and what the lines outside of them are like. (Basically, if you don't call home when your chance comes up, you don't know when you will get to call again.)

So, Mom calls kid from Iraq. He takes the call, even though he is at school. (The school allows kids to carry cellphones at schools, but not use them during school hours.)

A teacher calls the kid on the carpet for breaking the rules. Because he, finally, has a chance to talk to mom, he is less than polite with the teacher.

Kid gets a 10 day suspension.

The local community goes nuts. It gets to the point where the calls coming in to the school's switchboard overwhelm the secretary. So, in a gesture of "graciousness", they reduce the kid's suspension from 10 days to 3.

How nice.

You want my opinion?

Suspend the teacher, and the jerk who came up with that rule in the first place, reinstate the kid, give him and his mother official written apologies that are published in the local paper ... for a start.

No school that has as large of a population of military kids has any business acting that way. Not if they want to begin to appear to care for their students.

It might be time to start suing teachers and schools for malpractice.