Permission slip

A permission slip has one job a checklist cannot do: get a clear, recorded yes or no from a guardian before a child leaves the building. A radio choice with an explicit no does that; a checkbox someone forgot to tick does not, because it looks identical to a guardian who never saw the form. The rest of the form is what a teacher needs if something goes wrong on the day — a second phone number for someone who is not the guardian, and anything medical worth knowing before, not after.

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Two phone numbers, deliberately

The guardian's phone and the emergency contact's phone are two separate phone fields, because the point of an emergency contact is being reachable when the guardian who signed is not. A single phone field, as the other templates here use for one contact, would not serve that.

A missing reply is different from a "no"

Permission is a required radio choice, not a checkbox someone might forget to tick. That distinguishes a guardian who said no from one who has not replied yet — the two need different follow-up, and a checkbox conflates them into the same empty state.

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Permission slip

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How to build this form

5 steps in the editor. Nothing here needs a paid plan.

Add a text field for the student's name and a text field for the guardian's name.
Add email and phone fields for the guardian, and a second phone field for an emergency contact who is not the guardian.
Add a date field for the activity date and a long text field for medical notes, left optional.
Add a radio group for permission with two explicit options — yes and no — and mark it required.
Share the form's link with guardians. Each reply is stored with the time it was submitted, so you can see who has not replied yet as well as who has.

Fields in this form

8 fields, using 6 of the 19 field types available.

Question	Field type	Required
Student's name	Short text	Yes
Guardian's name	Short text	Yes
Guardian email	Email	Yes
Guardian phone	Phone	Yes
Emergency contact phone (not the guardian)	Phone	Yes
Activity date	Date	Yes
Medical notes or allergies	Long text	Optional
Do you give permission for your child to attend?	Radio buttons	Yes

What goes wrong with this form

Specific to a permission slip, not general advice about forms.

One phone field for everyone

If the emergency contact shares the guardian's own phone field, you learn nothing new when the guardian cannot be reached — which is exactly when you need it. A second phone field, for someone who is not the guardian, is what makes the emergency contact worth having.

Permission as an optional checkbox

An unchecked box looks identical to a guardian who has not seen the form yet. Make it a required radio with an explicit "No" option, so a refusal is data you can act on instead of silence you have to chase.

No date field for the activity

Without a date field, "the trip" is whichever trip is current when someone reads the response — fine for one slip, unusable once you are running the same activity across a term. A date field is what makes the response set filterable by trip rather than assumed from context.

Questions about this form

What information does a permission slip need?

Seven fields cover it: the student's name, a guardian's name, email and phone, an emergency contact who is not the guardian, any medical notes, and an explicit yes/no for permission. Anything past that is usually specific to one activity, not the form.

Can a guardian say no on a permission slip?

Yes — permission is a required radio choice with an explicit "No" option, not a checkbox. An unchecked box and a guardian who has not seen the form yet look identical; an explicit no is recorded the same as any other answer, so you can tell the two apart.

Do I need a separate emergency contact field, or is the guardian's phone enough?

A separate field. The guardian's phone is who you call first; the emergency contact is who you call when that does not work. Combining them into one phone field means you learn nothing new at the exact moment you need to.

Is an online permission slip legally the same as a signed paper one?

Not the same thing, and it doesn't need to be for most activities. What it gives you instead is every answer — including an explicit "No" — timestamped to the millisecond, so you can tell a guardian who has genuinely declined from one who simply hasn't opened the link yet, which a paper slip stuck in a backpack cannot do. If your school's policy specifically requires a wet or digital signature, keep that process for the ones that need it and use this to see who is still outstanding.

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