Your child comes home and says a kid at school “won’t leave her alone.” Maybe it happened once. Maybe it’s the third time this month. You have about ten seconds to decide whether this complaint is ordinary conflict or bullying that requires you to step…
Bullying Prevention Month is an occasion to talk about kindness. It is also a reminder to check your negligent supervision exposure, because the numbers are not close. A 2022 analysis of English and Welsh police data found that 52% of child sexual abuse and exploitation cases involved another…
Tom Rawlings and I will speak at the Christian Legal Society’s General Counsel Forum in Denver, Colorado, on October 8. We’re joining a panel on Trey’s Laws. Those laws are the state statutes and pending federal bill addressing settlement confidentiality in abuse cases. If you…
Last week, we presented a workshop at the CAFO Summit on planning for a crisis before it happens, drawing on content we had already built through prior work and our online courses. I expected the content itself to be the most valuable part of our…
A Fresh Start A few mornings ago, I was out in the neighborhood, walking off my previous indulgences with sweets, when I saw a sight I had not seen in a while. A school bus. The Cheese. It was the first day of school for…
Minnesota made grooming a stand-alone felony this August, and other states have passed similar laws in recent years. It is a genuinely interesting development in criminal law, and it is worth understanding. But the law really doesn’t address how grooming works. More importantly, if you run…
Every fall, I pack cases with pop-up displays, books, and a tablecloth with our logo on it. Then I drive or fly to a conference so large it fills an entire building, packed with strangers who already understand why I’m there. I don’t have to…
A program director resigns after you find text messages with a teenage participant that don’t warrant a mandated report but do violate policy. Six weeks later, a camp two states away calls asking for a reference. What you say next can cause legal problems, and…
September is National Kinship Care Month. It exists to recognize caregivers who take in a relative’s child, a group that gets far less attention than foster or adoptive families, even in child welfare circles that specialize in this work. I spent several years fostering my own…
In my blog post last week, I covered how to plan ahead and prepare for a crisis. This week, I want to move to how you respond when your worst fears come true. A crisis moves fast in the first 24 hours, then differently in the week that follows….
September is National Kinship Care Month. It’s a great time to recognize the people who do the tough job of caring for children within their extended families. It’s also a good time to recognize the legal gaps that many such caregivers can fall into. Picture a grandmother…
On September 24 at the CAFO Summit in Atlanta, Tom and I are leading a workshop called “Start Planning Now for a Crisis.” It’s built for youth-serving organizations that want a real plan in place before something goes wrong, not a scramble after it does….