(DAILY MAIL) A Massachusetts teacher was refused three paid days off to welcome back her soldier stepson who was severely wounded in a grenade explosion while serving in Afghanistan.
Sonya Lomax, a high school math teacher in Carver, Massachusetts, had asked for the three additional days to visit her badly injured stepson, 23-year-old Army Specialist Todd Lomax.
The soldier was seriously hurt after being blasted by shrapnel in a grenade explosion in Kandahar Province in October.
The teacher had already spent all of her nine days of allotted leave visiting Todd at Maryland's Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was being treated for fractures, lacerations and head trauma.
But when she requested the additional three days of leave for 'extenuating circumstances,' she was flatly told no, a local TV station reported.
Lomax requested the extra time so that she can visit him when he returns to Fort Drum in New York, where his unit is based but the superintendent of Carver High School, Liz Sorrell, refused to allow her the extra paid days.
Sorrell insisting she was bound by the contract agreed upon by the school system and the teacher's union
After her appeal was denied, many Carter residents, like Paul Johnson, said the board should have made an exception in Lomax's case.
''We can find a way to fund almost anything else,' Johnson said. ''We can fund thousands of dollars in other things, but we can’t fund something for a young man who gave a portion of his body for us?
'We need to make an exception. This isn’t about bureaucracy; this is about doing the right thing tonight.''
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TXT 24
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