thursday,march 21, 2013 - County Times - Southern Maryland Online

13 Thursday, March 21, 2013
The County Times
Spotlight On
School Visitor Practices Maybe Inhospitable
By Guy Leonard
Staff Writer
A working group presented a list of best practices
addressing both safety and orderly school environment
for students and safety last week to the Board of
Education.
While not elevated to “policy” or “regulations” the
recommended best practices and procedures were developed
similar to other regulations discussed during
the working group meetings.
These include encouraging parents and registered
volunteers to bring non-food items for celebrations,
but if bringing in food, it cannot be homemade. It must
come from a store. Volunteers and parents are discouraged
from hugging or having long interactions with
children other than their own.
The recommended changes came from a working
group convened before the Sandy Hook tragedy to review
safety and security procedures.
At least one board member decried the new practices
as too restrictive and even threatened to reduce
parental involvement in schools.
Others on the board, though, said that the suggestions
rules would help foster greater security in schools
when times have shown them to be vulnerable.
Trish Post, president of the County Council of
PTAs, said so far the new best practices have elicited
a great deal of feed back from parents; public forums
are scheduled in coming weeks to gather opinions from
parents.
In a later interview, Post said the new recommendations
are taken too literally and are not as extreme as
some think.
“These are guidelines for principals and teachers
to fall back on,” Post said. “Of course we don’t want
people to push children away.”
Post was on the committee that produced the
document.
“It’s not being interpreted the way we were thinking
about them,” she said, adding that many of the
practices were designed to help school administrators
deal with large numbers of volunteers in schools at or
over capacity.
These best practices address cafeteria, playground,
classroom and school-wide environments. Parents cannot
approach teachers for a conference directly but
must make an appointment before hand and student’s
siblings who are not enrolled in the school should not
make visits in the cafeteria.
The store bought food recommendation was to address
a major concern – one in three children have food
allergies.
“It’s unfortunate, but I’m definitely OK with that,”
she said of the new policy.
Children cannot handout party invitations; however
the parent and teacher associations (PTA) can still
compile names and addresses of students with parental
consent for extra-curricular events.
Board member Cathy Allen said she was waiting
to see whether the new rules worked out or needed
adjustment.
But she lamented the fact the new rules seemed to
be necessary; parents had complained about volunteers
hugging children that were not theirs, she said.
“I said they were horrible and I stand by that,” she
said. “What I find horrible is that we need this conversation.
We as a society have arrived at a place where
fear and mistrust are the order of the day. We need to
strike a common sense balance between trust and suspicion,
between care and concern.”
The presentation to the board started off with a
discussion regarding the difference between practices
and policy/regulations. Now that these best practices
are implemented at the elementary school level until
the end of the year, the next steps will be to meet with
parents, teachers and media and gather feedback.
According to the PowerPoint slides, “The Best
Practices document will be subsumed and considered
for inclusion as Regulations KI-R. As a revised policy
is adopted, the school level regulations will be modified
to address more current practice.”
Furthermore, the presentation states, “The goal
of the Best Practices document is to provide consistency
between schools while allowing schools to make
needed adjustments based on capacity, enrollment, and
class size.”
The PowerPoint slides on the presentation are
available off the SMCPS website under Board of Education,
Board Docs, Meeting Agenda for March 13,
2013
guyleonard@countytimes.net