Safety in a Busy Building

Posted by
Carrie Henderson Weston
Oct 27, 2006

One of the issues that has changed the most over the years at my work for St. Michael Lutheran school here in Michigan has been safety. When I began working at St. Micael, the daycare was relatively small, attached to larger church. We would often be left alone in the afternoons and evenings when the pastor and administrative assistant who served both the school and church left for the day.

This resulted in unforseen complications. Because the lights were on and it was obvious that people were active inside, people who were unkown to the church and to the staff of the school would sometimes come inside. Sometimes people would ask to speak to the pastor about some personal issue or ask to see someone who was a member of the church who was not there at the time or was in another area of the sprawling building. These were issues that we relatively knew how to handle, but occassionally other people would enter that was more worrisome. Fairly often people would enter and mistakenly come to us to ask for some sort of financial assiatnce when no one else was present and typically we could show them to the pastor or have the administrative assistant direct them to community resources that the church partnered with, but a few times no one was available and the person asking for assiatnce wouldn't understand that we were not employees of the church itself and could not help them in that way, and then became difficult and angry.

This made me personally nervous and my strategy was to keep the person near the door of the hallway where the daycare was located and offer them options that they could seek out for financial help. It was my experience that most of those who became frustrated were not genuinely in need for a valid reason, but rather wanted to intimidate the staff into giving them money from our own pockets.

Thankfully, we were always able to negotiate with these people, but even for the sake of protecting our students from hearing "naughty words" these were tense situations. Our school now covers this issue for all "closers" and has a list of numbers for the closer to call for financial assistance as well as the number of the pastor, who is willing to drop by if there is a real issue.

With buldings such as ours that are used by a variety of people who may not be known to the daycare, individual solutions must be found to insure the safety of the students and staff.

Visit my most recent article on Daycare Safety.