Parents Considering Lawsuit Against School District After Daughter Doesn’t Make Valedictorian

If your child graduated with the second-highest GPA in his or her entire graduating class, you'd call that a great accomplishment, right? Nope, you'd call that grounds for a lawsuit, according to these helicopter parents.

The parents of a California high school graduate are considering a lawsuit against the school district after their "little snowflake" did not make valedictorian. She was, instead, forced to settle for "salutatorian."

Elisha Marquez has been accepted to Ivy League schools and is on her way to Stanford in the fall. The 18-year-old has already nabbed an engineering internship at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and earned a scholarship through the Gates Millennium Scholars program.

But according to Eagle Rock Patch, she had only a 4.50 weighted GPA after the first semester of her senior year, one notch below Eagle Rock High’s Jasmine Fernandez, who managed a 4.55.

Consequently, Fernandez stood as the 3,000-student school’s valedictorian Wednesday, and Marquez had to settle for salutatorian, according to Elisha’s father, Nelson.

And to Elisha’s mother, Carol, the second-place finish means that her daughter's "sleepless nights" were essentially “for nothing.”

"It's flawed. It's wrong," Carol told The Times. "All her hard work is not being recognized. All she had was straight A's. Not a B, ever."

Forget the frivolous lawsuit for a moment. What saddens me the most about this is that these parents are doing exactly the same thing they're blaming the district for: they're not paying a lick of attention to what this girl has done. Being named salutatorian is a huge honor and really something to be celebrated. So what if it's second place? This girl has still worked hard, she's  very bright, and she's pretty much set for future success. How about you be proud of your daughter instead of telling her "You didn't do good enough?"