Reply to Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Whitman Teacher and Crew Coach Arrested"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m still stuck on letting a grown man take all these girls to Airbnb’s for out of town trips with no other adults/parents present. No one working with children should be given this kind of access. There were signs that he was inappropriate and the signs were completely ignored because parents wanted the status and success and scholarship money more than safety for their children. Period. [/quote]

The problem with this thinking is that it allows you -- us -- to imagine that we are all sooo different from those Whitman parents, that different parents -- better parents -- would have noticed the signs and put a stop to things long ago.

Forget the part where that's a pretty uncharitable caricature of the Whitman community -- but it doesn't keep anyone safer. The fact is -- and this is backed up by research, feel free to google -- that we're [i]all[/i] susceptible to manipulation. Predators show up in all kinds of communities. We are all vulnerable, to different degrees. All of our communities are full of individuals and families that are goal-driven, hardworking, that are achieve this or that. Our kindness makes us vulnerable. Our tendency to believe the best of people makes us vulnerable.

There's a litany of human psychological traits that make us easy prey for the most nefarious among us.

So yes to safeguards, yes to learning lessons. But the blame/shame thing here is, at best, not very constructive. And at worst, it's cruel.

Stop wagging your fingers and open your ears. Every community has voices that are marginalized and not listened to. Find the voices at your school. trust me they are there. [/quote]

NP. Neither I nor any of the parents I know would be comfortable with our girls staying at an air BNB with a male coach and no female parent chaperones. For whatever reason, this was an extremely poor and reckless choice.

Also, it's clear the board with the exception of the dissenting parent, choose anticipated success of well-being.[/quote]

To put the practice in context, other MCPS teams travel out of state with students and there is little oversight by parents and school administrators. Best practice would be for a school administrator to go with any group of students who are staying overnight for an event.

One example is cross country and track teams across MCPS. Many have at least one overnight trip with no school administrators traveling with teams. I am not against teams traveling for sporting events, but there should be stricter oversight and monitoring to keep students safe on these types of trips. Having a Principal or Assistant Principal or even the Athletic Director travel with a team brings in better safeguards and monitoring what goes on during the trip.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics