If your field trip permission slip just says “permission to attend,” you are both missing an opportunity and taking on unnecessary risk. A permission slip is not a formality. It is a working document that protects children, informs parents, and gives your organization a clear…
Imagine your phone rings on a Friday night. A parent says something happened to their child at your program. Within days, your lawyer may tell you to do what a South Carolina pastor just went through: a pastor who refused to answer shouted questions at a…
Tom Rawlings and I are presenting a poster at the ISPCAN 2026 World Congress next week. The poster, “Creating a Just Safety Culture within Youth-Serving Organizations,” makes an argument we think every YSO administrator needs to hear: a written policy does not protect children. A culture that…
A South Carolina church now faces four criminal defendants and four civil lawsuits, all traced back to a volunteer with a criminal history. The details of that case matter less than the pattern behind it. Most of the failures that lawyers and sources allege in recent…
Every August, as new volunteers sign up for the school year, someone on staff asks the same question. How thorough should this person’s background check be? The instinct is to answer by job title, treating “volunteer” as one category and “staff” as another. That instinct…
Ask any administrator whether their organization keeps records on staff and volunteers, and the answer is almost always yes. Ask that same administrator how quickly the organization can produce every record connected to one specific person, from every system. Their confidence usually drops. The problem…
Your organization’s legal exposure does not end with an injury or claim. What your program directors, operations staff, and child safety coordinator say after an incident, in emails, in conversations with parents, in staff meetings, and on social media, can come back as evidence against…
A Texas school district just finished defending a retaliation claim. It took four years, a CPS investigation, and a trip to the Fifth Circuit for the school system to win. Dr. Johnathan Castille, a special education administrator, reported two teachers in 2021 for allegedly abusing students. He…
A background check that satisfies your state’s minimum legal requirement can still miss the exact record that matters most. Organizations run the background check, treat a clean result as proof of due diligence, and move on. Neither the check nor the confidence it produces always…
One of the biggest problems in youth organizations is staff burnout. In one survey of Colorado child welfare workers, half reported high levels of compassion fatigue. That’s not an unusual number for youth organizations. It’s a problem that we need to notice and address, because compassion…
Most administrators think of a code of conduct as a child protection tool. Attorneys and courts think of it as evidence. If your organization receives any federal funding, a written harassment or conduct policy will likely become a central exhibit in any serious Title IX…
On July 17, 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn with a flight plan filed for California. He landed in Dublin, Ireland twenty-eight hours later and blamed a faulty compass. History remembers him fondly as “Wrong Way” Corrigan. Your organization’s child protection program will…