My question involves a child custody case from the State of: Michigan
My first wife (and mom of my 4 kids) died several years ago. I remarried 3 years ago and my wife has been a great mom to my kids. Two years ago I signed documents with the school and doctors allowing her to act as legal guardian on all issues. There was never a problem until the school violated one of the kids' Special Ed IEPs this year. Documents started disappearing from the school's files and the teachers didn't like that my wife was documenting everything in emails. They call meetings during the day when they know I can't be there because of the kind of work I do. So only my wife can attend. She documents everything because of the problems we've had.
Suddenly I got a voice mail (not even a letter...remember they don't like things in writing!) from the middle school principal telling me that he "did some research" and found that my wife isn't the kids' "legal guardian" and so they won't talk to her anymore and don't want her emailing anything to anyone or being copied on any more emails. They did this just a couple of hours before parent-teacher conferences, knowing I couldn't be there, so none of us could even go to the school to discuss how the kids are doing.
What's under all of this is that the director of Special Ed got caught backdating a letter to comply to a legal deadline. We have the envelope proving she backdated it by 5 days to make it look like she was in compliance. She is also in law school and thinks she's already a lawyer.
I know there are probably a dozen different ways to look at this, but my wife and I are on the same page on everything. By cutting her out of the picture, they might have a short term fix to not wanting to deal with issues, but in the big picture they just made a lot of bad feelings and make it harder to help our kids.
What are my wife's rights and what can we do to make this workable with the school short of having to spend a whole lot of money we don't have on an adoption? This is Detroit and losing time from work to deal with this during the day only makes it likely that we'll lose our jobs.

