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Preschool and Daycare Discussion
PSA - Sex abuse at Washington Hebrew
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Anonymous
This x 1000 (regardless of special needs) |
Anonymous
| Teachers are back at school now. Can anyone say which teacher was missing? |
Anonymous
Just to elaborate, as requested. I would put it a bit differently than DJ doesn’t tell parents what happens during the day. I would say, to some extent she doesn’t know, and that’s not good. She doesn’t spending time in individual classrooms, at all, and she defends her teachers fiercely, even when uncalled for. She is reluctant to make changes with staff. She is also often not even present - she is the head of both the Macomb campus and the Potomac one, and is slated to spend much more time in Potomac. So, good luck even finding her sometimes. I think she also gernerally gives lofty, bombastic, self-flattering answers to questions but not specifics and not direct answers. |
Anonymous
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Suggestions from a parent who went through this at LAMB:
My first suggestion is to reach out to the school and tell them you expect them to include alums in this process and want to know what their plan is for doing so. Unfortunately our alums had to be pretty vocal in order to be heard but hopefully your experience will be different there. What's tough is in this situation the school has to be very deliberate so in order to get information you have to be fairly aggressive. In theory, they have been able to identify which children are affected and are focusing on that group first. Our experience was that LAMB neglected to consider a number of ways other children could have been affected and once those variables were taken into account (substitute teaching, summer camp, etc), the net was far wider. And they were so focused on current students it took them awhile to reach out to alums. We ended up working closely with Safe Shores (https://www.safeshores.org/) and to be honest, they were a far better resource than the school in helping families understand things. You could definitely reach out to them to learn more about what to be aware of and what to do if anything concerning comes up. I'm also happy to talk through this live if you'd like. It's truly an awful thing to go through and a club no one wants to be a part of but I have lots of advice and resources - even if for other parents you know who may need it. |
Anonymous
Hopefully DJ will get knocked off her pedestal long enough to realize that her horrendous management (or lack thereof it seems) allowed a predator to potentially abuse children right under her nose. If the allegations end up being true (which I am sure they are), she needs to be fired and never allowed to work in education again. If WH won't make any changes, then they are as bad as the Catholic Church and should be shut down. |
Anonymous
This. |
Anonymous
| We had a horrible experience at WHC, but comparing to Catholic Church is a bit far fetched. Some one with less hubris should run the place. |
Anonymous
PP here - I said "IF" they don't make any changes. I'm not comparing them now. But if it turns out that the allegations are true, and they don't remove her, or just move her to Potomac campus only, how is that not *exactly* what the catholic church has done? Because it's "only" 1 victim (that we know of)? Because it hasn't been going on for years (that we know of)? Because she didn't want it to happen and feels bad? There needs to be a zero tolerance policy here - as soon as this kind of thing happens, the director is out. Period. Someone has to be accountable, and if not the director, then who? Especially if she has a history of not even being aware of what goes on in her school, not communicating to parents, covers for her teachers even when they are in the wrong, etc. If she stays, then my comparison still stands and they are choosing the director over the children, and that is unacceptable. Hubris or not, this is on her. |
Anonymous
| Has anyone heard more details on which teacher or classroom this affected? |
Anonymous
You clearly have an axe to grind against DJ. Let's wait and see what actually transpired, who did or should have known about it, whether certain precautions (such as background checks) were not taken, etc. Maybe she should go based on what happened, either because of what she did or did not do directly, or because it was something egregious enough that the buck should stop at the top. But your current statement that, as director, she should lose her job if something occurred under any circumstances, reeks of you having issues with DJ unrelated to this incident. |
Anonymous
Nope. I'm not the PP who complained about her but nice try. My personal interactions with her have always been fine, I think she seems nice on the surface and excited about running a Jewish school. But I don't tolerate child abuse, and to me, the head of school bears the ultimate responsibility. If the allegations are false, then I am not calling for her to be fired. If they are, yes she needs to be fired. I would say this about any school director, whether I thought they were fantastic or not. Also there are clearly other parents who have had serious issues with her lack of oversight/management, her unwillingness to communicate to parents and her support of teachers when the support is not warranted. These are all major problems in and of themselves that it sounds like WHC has completely ignored - which is very troubling. It's a little frightening to me that you are so willing to go to bat for her considering that, even in the best of news, she was just really wholly unaware that someone at her school was doing something bad. As to your comment "who did or should have known about it" - I don't understand parents like you. At the end of the day, the school director is responsible for knowing everything that goes on. Period. If there is no system of accountability, the higher ups can always just claim "well i had no idea!". |
Anonymous
And I don't understand parents who claim that, ipso facto, an incident of abuse should lead to a director's dismissal, regardless of the facts and circumstances of the incident and other aspects of someone's performance. Should the principal of Sandy Hook, or any other school where there was a school shooting, necessarily lose his or her job because something terrible happened on his or her watch? |
Anonymous
You are seriously equating the director hiring an employee that abused a child with a random stranger or student coming into a school and shooting people? You really don't see any difference at all in terms of responsibility between those 2 types of incidents? Wow. |
Anonymous
Wow. The Sandy Hook principal didn’t invite the shooter into the school and pay him for being there. DJ brought the perpetrator into the school, kept and paid him or her for several years, failed to supervise him, and endangered many, many innocent, YOUNG children. She should be ashamed of herself, but knowing her, she’s probably blindly smiling, offering empty platitudes of concern, and saying “let’s learn from this,” without acknowledging her large part in this. |
Anonymous
Clearly your broader feelings about DJ have nothing to do with your current views. And we don't know who this employee was and what role the director would have had in hiring or supervising this person. Say it was someone in maintenance. She probably had no direct role in hiring or supervising this person. Maybe there were broader systematic issues that allowed someone to slip through the cracks - such as a poor hiring process or failure to do background checks - for which leadership may reasonably be held accountable. But we don't know enough facts about this case to yet make that determination. |