The employer’s field does not establish family permissions. Review each person’s actual L dependent eligibility, status and intended activities.
Separate study permission from work authorization
L dependents may study while maintaining the applicable status. Qualifying L spouses are employment authorized incident to status with appropriate documentation; children do not gain work permission solely through L dependent status. Study does not itself extend authorized stay.
Handle the two permissions on separate pages of the same plan. For study, confirm the intended school, the start date and what the institution asks to see at registration, since a school's paperwork requirements are its own and are not an immigration ruling. For work, confirm whose status supports it, what evidence of that status exists today, and when it expires.
Hypothetical example: the spouse of an employee transferred to run a clinical documentation training programme is offered part-time work at a medical publisher and is told the offer is enough; it is not, and what matters is whether the spouse holds qualifying L spousal status with appropriate documentation of it. Children gain no work permission through L dependent status whatever the parent's role, and permission to study extends no one's authorized stay. Where a dependent's own end date falls before the principal's, plan the household around the earlier one.
Where a school asks for a document the family does not hold, treat that first as a question about the school's own admission rules rather than as proof that a status problem exists.