This past fall I was teaching middle school classes, and whenever a student was sent out of my classroom, I'd document it for the admin and then try to contact the parents to let them know what happened. We'd have email addresses, phone numbers, cell numbers, you name it, but at one point in October I had something like 12 or 13 consecutive students whose parents either a) had their phone or cell disconnected (most common), b) didn't answer the phone or return messages, or c) had email messages that came back as invalid addresses. The only option would be mailing addresses, and those usually weren't any better. In some cases I had to ask the student how to get a hold of his/her parent(s), and they often didn't know. I'm working at a very small school in a very rural area, so you'd assume that it shouldn't be that hard to track down parents/guardians. You'd be wrong. The number of consecutive families that couldn't be contacted isn't a large number, but when it's understood that those numbers and addresses had just been updated 2 months earlier, it's a mind-boggling amount of unpredictability and transience and (in many cases) negligence and irresponsibility.
