Reply to Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Parents let children stay in an Airbnb without a chaperone.

The board is responsible for mishandling the information… sharing it with the perpetrator, not trusting the girls.

Parents are responsible for letting their desire for a great school allow them to put their child in harms way. [/quote]

[quote=Anonymous]
I understand that no parent should assume predation couldn't happen to their kid, but these parents created excessive risk by not listening and by allowing this coach on fettered access w/ no other chaperones. No. My kids would not have been at risk in this situation because I would have pulled the over their feedback or the AirBNB situation.
 [/quote]

I do not dispute at all that things were mishandled! But to my mind, it is more productive  -- and kinder -- to look at HOW the parents and the board came to make inappropriate choices than to blame and denounce them. Blaming them makes us feel better,  superior, has the psychological effect of separating us from them. WE would have been like the one board member who voted no. WE would have pulled our kids.

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

The majority of parents here did not, and I challenge the assumption that those parents are fundamentally different from you or me.

So, maybe a great school isn't your Achilles heel. What is? Maybe another kid's parents fight all of the time and she feels at ease around their easygoing teacher. Maybe another kid has struggled with depression and conversations with coach seem more effective than any of the crappy therapists your kid has had. Maybe you are working late, or you work two jobs, or you are attending to your kid with profound special needs, and sure it would GREAT if coach drove them home this one time. That was very kind of them to offer, wasn't it.

The point is, we ALL have blind spots. And the really skilled predators take their time. Grooming is SLOW. It is a long game. They play all the angles -- and that includes massaging the parents, incrementally getting the whole freaking communitiy used to this or that, so by the time your kid asks for permission to do something that really shouldn't be done, you say yes because you have been thoroughly psychologically conditioned to do so.

And THIS is my point, to bring awareness to the social and psychological conditioning at play. Not to excuse anyone, but because this is the awareness that keeps us safer.

this should certainly be part of the health curriculum, don't you think? I would love every middle schooler in the county to know that no teacher or coach should ever ask them to keep a secret. or text them directly. or give them gifts.

that kind of thing[/quote]

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