Just as a point of reference, it's actually possibly more helpful to tell your child to go to a "mother with kids," because kids have an easier time identifying kids than uniforms (think of the perspective when they are under 4 ft tall) and also because which profession statistically has the most serial killers? Security guard. Protecting the Gift is a great book on this.

Anyways that aside I think the best way to raise helpful kids is to be helpful to others in their presence. This involves a certain amount of talking to strangers and inconvenience. :)

Shandra - we've had this discussion many times on OB and OP. Bah, humbug! My kids have always been taught to go to police in that situation. Re: Protecting the Gift - I'm not a huge fan of Gavin DeBecker. Some of the things he says are really good, but other things - like teach your young children to be afraid of police because they might mistakenly go to a security guard - are total crocks.

Didn't know this statistic about security guards-is this common knowledge? Thanks for the info. I was hope sick yesterday and watched Oprah and it was all about kidnapped kids-very disturbing.

armybrat- the problem with teaching your kids to go to police officers is, how they heck are they supposed to find one??? In my community, at least, the only time you are likely to see officers is if they are running a speed trap. If my kids get lost, the chances of them being able to find a cop are about 0. A mother with kids, otoh, is pretty easy to spot most of the time.

floof - a lost child going to a mother with kids is not a bad idea, particularly if they're in a neighborhood with no cops around. (And no, the cops don't hang around my neighborhood much, either - it's not a high crime area.) My concern is with the explicit advice to teach your child to AVOID a police officer because the child may not recognize the difference between an actual police uniform and a security guard in a uniform designed to resemble a police uniform.

Never heard of Gavin DeBecker..zzzzzzzzzzz.

and here we go with the hysteria.

if my kid gets lost i'd trust anyone to do the right thing and help him out. i don't care if it's a shopkeeper, security guard, teenager, man, woman... whoever.

i refuse to believe that there are a significant number of predators out there looking to harm little kids.

A great story, thanks for sharing!

I'd like to think my son (4) would help when he was older. I think at this age he would be paralyzed seeing a little kid crying. But he would definitely go get me or another grownup to help.

Kudos to those two boys! I admit, I had to wonder, was this a poor neighborhood? If so, it should be noted. So many people think only gang fights happen there. It would be nice to hear a positive story.

I read about this in the Metro section yesterday. I wish reporters would stop quoting officials who say they can't comment because of privacy issues. The parents are talking so they are clearly not concerned about privacy and these are public officials/employees involved. Find a way to make them talk. When i was covering local news in upstate new york as a college student I got that response a lot. I said, okay, who is your FOIA officer. You don't want to talk now, I'll spend a couple of days pouring over all your paperwork. Let's see what else I can find. Why was the teacher allowed to miss a "mandatory" training session? This school put a kid on the wrong bus, dropped him at the wrong spot and the best they can say is we're reviewing our policies?

Actually, they didn't *just* put the kid on the wrong bus. The kid wasn't supposed to be on a bus at all, he was supposed to stay for afterschool care. It was a really huge screw-up. If he hadn't run into someone who helped him, it could have been really bad since his parents wouldn't have even noticed he was missing for several hours, and nobody would have been looking for him.

Almost all people in the world are good - even in the "bad parts" of town. It's a nice story that the boy was fine despite some administrative mistakes but not surprising at all to me. We tell our boys to ask a policeman or mom if they get lost.

Security guards are serial killers? How many, like 60% of them? Good gravy, one more useless factoid for me to ignore.

My son was put on the bus on Monday when I had submitted a note to the teacher that he would be a walker for that day. Then the bus driver let him off at the stop with a 5 year old when the daycare was closed! Luckily there was a parent across the street who got them and called the school. We picked up our son and brought the little girl back to school so they could contact her parents.

Principal told me it is on the teacher to make sure that the kids got on the bus/wait for parental pick especially if routine changes for the day. I now have to get in contact with someone at the school bus depot and find out why they left two kids at a stop without making sure they entered the building safely. They would had seen they were closed for the holiday!!

I say kudos to the apartment building manager who took the personal responsibility (and risk) to return the lost child to the parents.

Most people would have called the police in this situation which would have gotten CPS involved. This would mean that the protective services would have taken the child into custody, possibly even foster care as they launched their investigation. Though CPS rarely gets involved with anything to do with public school activities, even to the point where the policy of the states that permit corporal punishment have had kids so severely paddled that the child requires hospilization, you can bet there will be no punative action taken against the members of the administration who are ultimately responsible for the mishap. If anyone gets punished, you can bet it will be the lowest peon on the bottom rung of the ladder that had anything to do with this case.

What really has frosted my pop-tarts in the past week is that I read an article where a kid was expelled from school for 45 days for bringing what amounts to be a campset of eating utensils to school. In the interest of "safety" to the other students, the administrators declared the campset could be used as a weapon and claimed they had no other recourse than to follow their policy and expell the kid. A fork, knife and spoon a weapon? Oh please! What next can we expect from these bozos? Hint: they will declare pencils contraband since every year kids get stabbed by the sharpened point.

OK, now I read today's blog article where a child was truely placed in an endangered situation by the negligence of public school staff and what will they do about it? Review their policy, which is simply codewords for calling a meeting and engage in a finger pointing exercise. As I have said before,Us parents not only have criminals to fear, but possibly even more so, the incompetence of those who have been entrusted to the "rightful" authority over our kids.

And thus concludes the Whacky rant of the week...

Us parents not only have criminals to fear, but possibly even more so, the incompetence of those who have been entrusted to the "rightful" authority over our kids.

Posted by: WhackyWeasel | October 14, 2009 12:10 PM | Report abuse

Duh. What else is new? Duh.

Gah. People always misunderstand statistics, but this kind particularly so:

"which profession statistically has the most serial killers? Security guard."

This does *not* mean that the majority, or even a significant number, of security guards are serial killers. It doesn't even mean that the majority of serial killers are security guards. And we don't know whether "most" is a percentage or a quantity. Either way, without context and hard numbers, this tells you exactly nothing.

It could be that just 0.00003% of security guards are serial killers, while every other profession has 0.000029% or less. The security guards have the "most", but it hardly matters.

It could also be that other professions have higher *percentages* of serial killers, but fewer in number. Say I've got 10 accountants and 1000 security guards. 4 of my accounts (40%) are serial killers, while 8 of my security guards (0.8%) are. Sure, the security guards have the "most" serial killers - twice as many! - but I'd be more scared of accountants for sure.

Bottom line, my guess is that anyone's chances of encountering a serial killer are low enough that making an effort to avoid them based on statistics is a waste of time. It's like avoiding white horses because you're afraid of meeting a unicorn.

PSA
The kid who brought the camp utensils to school was given a "lesser punishment." I think it was 3 days suspension to include the days already out - so I think he went back to school today.
I agree that this case is really out there. I mean do the people who teach our children not have ANY common sense?

On topic, I agree that your kids will be good people if they see their parents being good people.
I would be fit to be tied if a bunch of bozos put my kid in danger like this.
And I disagree with one thing Whackey said, the lowest person on the totem pole in this case is the bus driver and that person DESERVES to be soundly punished - putting a little kid out in a strange neighborhood? No, that person does not get another chance.

I read yesterday about the little boy getting bussed where he didn't belong, and made a bet with myself that it would be this blog's topic today. Thanks for letting me win my self-bet, Brian.

Helpful kids - funny how this plays into a conversation younger son and I had yesterday evening (while he was stalling before doing his science homework).

Spare pencils are very important to school kids, you know. Younger son always keeps a couple of extras in his backpack. And yesterday when he dropped a pencil in class, it rolled under someone else's desk, but that student was a nice guy and handed it back. If it had rolled under a bully's desk, the bully would have messed with him and not returned the pencil - that's why extra pencils are really good to have.

So, I suggested that a *really* nice guy (like him) who has a couple of spare pencils, and sees another kid getting messed with by a bully keeping the kid's pencil, could hand the kid one of his extra pencils and completely shut down the bully's game.

Kinda weird conversation, but younger son grinned about being called a "nice guy", and then finished his science outline in short order.

What I also would like to see is an explanation as to how this happened a MONTH into the school year. All these adults should have known where the kid was supposed to go, and the driver in particular should have thought, "hmm. I've never seen this kid before, and there's no one here to meet him, maybe I should take him back to school, or at least CALL AND FIND OUT IF THIS IS WHERE HE BELONGS."

I have to give a note with my second grader if he goes home a different way than normal.
So I did (one day he wants to go in carpool, one day he goes home with walkers, or whatever).
So, at least three times in the first month he wasn''t where he was supposed to be (one day he was supposed to go home the 'normal' way, and well, he wasn't on the bus).
So I am kind of angry. Why bother with the notes if nothing gets done with them?
Anyway - the other question is...do they require FIFTH graders to have these notes as well? When does it stop? When can our kids go home by themselves? I was doing it by 3rd grade.