A first grader gives her teacher a
hug. The teacher kisses the little girl on the top of her head. That used to be considered normal behavior
for elementary school students and their teachers. But not in the public schools of Prince
George’s County, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Instead, someone decided it
might be child abuse. So the teacher was placed on leave and barred from
teaching for eight weeks.
The teacher said the first-grader’s father
protested her removal. “The climate they’ve created is just horrendous,” she
said, noting that young children expect physical contact. “Are you not going to
hug a 4-year-old who is crying?”
It happened during the 2015-2016
school year. This year, the Post reports, things are much
worse. Nearly 850 school district
employees have been put on “administrative leave” because of some kind of
allegation of child abuse – a 1,000 percent increase over two years before. School staff are terrified, and even some
members of the Board of Education worry that a “culture of fear” will drive the
best teachers to seek employment elsewhere. The sheer volume of absences has
disrupted the education of thousands of students. And, of course, teachers are likely to fear
showing any kind of normal affection for students.
The child abuse paranoia machine has
struck again – and once again, it is harming children in the name of “protecting”
them.
While the behavior of school
district officials has been awful, at least they might be able to claim they
didn’t know better. Notwithstanding their good intentions, there is no excuse for the Washington, D.C. “Children’s
Advocacy Center” to encourage this kind of paranoia – but that’s what they’ve
done.
It began with a real horror story
What prompted all this was the kind
of thing that usually cranks up the paranoia machine – cases of child sexual
abuse that were very real and very serious.
In the Prince George’s County case, they involved a school aide, Deonte
Carraway. He was arrested in February, 2016. A year later he pled guilty to
sexually abusing 12 children. He told children as young as age 9 how to perform
sex acts, then he videotaped them. He
also coerced the children into sending him nude pictures. Police believe at
least 23 children were victimized.
There had been other cases in recent
years, and the school district had come under fire – and at least one lawsuit –
for failing to properly detect and investigate sexual abuse by school staff.
Unfortunately, the reaction to these
horrors was not to adopt prudent, sensible policies and urge people to report
when they had reasonable cause to suspect abuse. No, the reaction was what we
have seen so often
in the
past: Demands that anyone and everyone report anything and everything – and
a
paranoid
response to those demands.
The Post reports that the response led to cases such as these. According to the story:
● One teacher in Prince George’s County was
escorted out of her school this spring after being accused of making an
offensive remark in class. … [She says] she
did not make the comment and the job limbo has been tough. She gets paid, like
others on leave, but waits at home — reviewing her teaching materials, reading
journal articles, trying to keep her mind in the game. “I want to be teaching,”
she said.
●A counselor said he was accused of failing
to report a physical exchange between a student and staff member in the
cafeteria. But he says he had not witnessed the incident or been at school that
day. Placed on leave in January, he said he was cleared at an April hearing,
but has still not been called back to work. … He said he worries about his
students, some of whom he’s heard were suspended or expelled. He said he wants
to be back at work.
●A retiree working as a substitute teacher
said he was placed on leave last fall for tugging on a third-grader’s hoodie as
he sought to keep her in line in the hallway. He has been out more than six
months. “I cannot fault them for trying to help children who need protection,”
he said. “But they’ve gone overboard in the other direction.”
As for the teacher who
dared to kiss a child on the head, apparently she didn’t learn her lesson. She
was placed on leave again this year, this time for supposedly “not following
proper procedures when she reported seeing another staff member grab a student
by the shirt and shove him.”
This time she was
kept away from teaching for most of the school year.
And if the harm to
students and teachers isn’t enough, consider the expense to taxpayers and the
waste of money that could have been used to actually educate students: So far
this school year, the district has spent $10 million paying staff it won’t
allow to work – up from $650,000 two years ago.
They also have to pay substitutes, of course, but, district officials
say, they’ve cut those costs -- by doubling up classes and getting non-teachers
to fill in.
The Post notes that of the 840 reports
referred to child protective services, 90 percent were so absurd that they did
not even meet the minimal standards needed to start an investigation. So the
one bit of good news here is this: The deluge of false and trivial reports
probably did not wind up overloading child protective services workers – though
we don’t know if it caused any delays or other errors at the county’s child
abuse hotline.
Enablers of panic and paranoia
Is there anyone who
really would encourage this kind of panic and paranoia? Sadly, yes. They are people who, like so many
in child welfare have the best of motives. But they really ought to know
better.
I discussed this in
a
post I wrote more than a year ago. That post was a response to
this
essay by the Michelle Booth Cole, director of “Safe Shores” Washington’s “Children’s
Advocacy Center.” The essay begins with
the Prince George’s case and two other horror stories from around the nation.
From these horrors Cole
leaps to the conclusion that you should report someone to child protective
services, or the police, anytime “you just get the feeling that something’s not
right.” Cole wrote that she can’t
understand why a student would ever be allowed to be alone with a teacher or
how there could possibly still be places in schools “where no one can see what’s
going on.”
As I wrote last year,
we probably allow such things because
A) When a child needs to confide something
personal to the school nurse or guidance counselor, it makes sense that the door
would be closed and B) We don’t want to live in an Orwellian surveillance state
with cameras poking into every corner.
But that was just
the beginning. Cole even advocated the dangerous practice of distracted driving. She wrote:
Let’s say a school employee needed to give a
child a ride home, and only the two of them would be in the car. The adult
and/or the child could be on a cell phone the whole time, giving a running
description of the drive to the child’s parent or caregiver.
I also took issue
with Cole’s approach in general:
[F]rom as early as toddlerhood, Cole is
talking about raising children to be constantly wary and fearful. We’ve also
trained the adults in their lives to be wary of so much as giving them a hug
for fear it will be misinterpreted. All that is emotional abuse on a massive
scale.
(And that, of
course, was long before the Post
wrote about the paranoia in Prince George’s.)
When liberals abandon our principles
Even more alarming,
Cole got a lot of support from people who consider themselves liberals.
The same people who
are furious when an airline passenger is hauled off a plane because someone “just
got the feeling that something’s not right” when she
heard
the passenger speaking Arabic, have no problem applying the identical “feeling-that-something’s-not-right”
standard when the issue is child abuse. The same liberals who are appalled by
revelations concerning government spying on individuals see no problem with
turning our schools into models of domestic surveillance.
At one point in her
essay Cole writes: “Imagine what the world would look like if we did everything we could to keep kids safe?”
[Emphasis added.]
Well, now we don’t
have to imagine. It would look like the public schools in Prince George’s
County, Md. So it would look pretty damn
ugly.
