Well, we come from, essentially, the same culture, so perhaps I shouldn't draw generalizations out of our facing similar safety issues. Perhaps there is something about those in information distribution that makes us crack when put into administration. However, your school administrator does sound very like several of my middle managers.
We had a policy to call the police if a child was abandoned at the library. At closing time, 8:00 pm, I found a four year old little girl abandoned. I reported it to my supervisor and he said, just put her outside and lock the door. Now, I argued for policy in this case, because I knew that the officer would give her parents a stern talking to and there might well be deeper reasons at work for such an abandonment. A history of neglect, perhaps. But, my boss thought I just didn't want to leave the child alone (which, of course, I didn't). His solution? He assigned someone to watch her from the parking lot. That is...the management work around...was to put the tiny girl out into a lonely, vast parking lot, surrounded by woods, and make someone in the junior staff responsible for the life and well being of said child, while the rest of us went home. The staffer was told NOT to sit with the child, as that would violate policy, but to watch from their car.
What, I asked, was to happen if after we had locked the place down, someone came and put the child in a car or walked off with her? Isn't our culpability compounded? Our library was not only quite isolated, but we did have a recent incident of a child being carried off into the woods and sexually assaulted. Was the junior staffer to stop any adult and ask for ID? What if said adult were a hostile person? Were we just to assume that anyone who showed up was related? What was to stop the parents from then assuming that we would simply babysit their child if they showed up hours after the library closed? And what about the issue of abandoning a four year old little girl in a public place? The mother, as it turned out, had assumed the library closed at 10:00pm and had gone to her gym for a 30 minute workout. She arrived about 30 minutes after we closed. I stayed, of course, but, I was furious that we didn't follow policy on this one. Because, of course, I also really didn't know that it was the child's mother that arrived, other than her clucking and sorry...and her angry, "Get in the car!" which the child rushed to obey. I had no way of checking her id, and little opportunity, I did, however, explain to the mother that we were breaking policy. She was all huffy about her need to go to gym and how they didn't allow kids.
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Date: 2013-04-23 05:06 pm (UTC)We had a policy to call the police if a child was abandoned at the library. At closing time, 8:00 pm, I found a four year old little girl abandoned. I reported it to my supervisor and he said, just put her outside and lock the door. Now, I argued for policy in this case, because I knew that the officer would give her parents a stern talking to and there might well be deeper reasons at work for such an abandonment. A history of neglect, perhaps. But, my boss thought I just didn't want to leave the child alone (which, of course, I didn't). His solution? He assigned someone to watch her from the parking lot. That is...the management work around...was to put the tiny girl out into a lonely, vast parking lot, surrounded by woods, and make someone in the junior staff responsible for the life and well being of said child, while the rest of us went home. The staffer was told NOT to sit with the child, as that would violate policy, but to watch from their car.
What, I asked, was to happen if after we had locked the place down, someone came and put the child in a car or walked off with her? Isn't our culpability compounded? Our library was not only quite isolated, but we did have a recent incident of a child being carried off into the woods and sexually assaulted. Was the junior staffer to stop any adult and ask for ID? What if said adult were a hostile person? Were we just to assume that anyone who showed up was related? What was to stop the parents from then assuming that we would simply babysit their child if they showed up hours after the library closed? And what about the issue of abandoning a four year old little girl in a public place? The mother, as it turned out, had assumed the library closed at 10:00pm and had gone to her gym for a 30 minute workout. She arrived about 30 minutes after we closed. I stayed, of course, but, I was furious that we didn't follow policy on this one. Because, of course, I also really didn't know that it was the child's mother that arrived, other than her clucking and sorry...and her angry, "Get in the car!" which the child rushed to obey. I had no way of checking her id, and little opportunity, I did, however, explain to the mother that we were breaking policy. She was all huffy about her need to go to gym and how they didn't allow kids.