Betrayed

Today is the last day of science camp for the 2014/2015 school year. On Monday, we start setting up for nine weeks of summer camp. I will be working five weeks of day camp, and four weeks of our newish Trailblazers program. The forest is menacingly dry, and we'll have to be careful on windy days.

There is a reason for the long space between this post and the previous one. Something happened at camp that I've been hesitant to write about. Around a month ago, while at one of Willow's softball games, I got a call from my boss to inform me that one of my coworkers had been arrested for child pornography. Of course, I was floored. Just moments before the call, I had been talking with Sophie about how much we liked this person. After the call, and the person we thought we liked was proven not to exist. We had liked a fiction, a disguise. Since the arrest, he has also been accused of molestation, and there has been word that he was not only trading pictures online (which is what got him caught), but manufacturing them. I'm not sure how much is actually true, but at the very least, he had child pornography on his laptop and phone, so he belongs in jail and permanently away from children even if the other allegations turn out to be false.

At a subsequent work meeting, one of my other coworkers stated that it was like somebody had died. There has indeed been a grieving process, with all of the usual steps: disbelief, anger, determination to move on, and everything in between. For me, the feeling of betrayal is the one that has stuck. The media, being the sensationalist monster that it is, has inflamed things with article after article on the subject. The result has been general outrage amongst a vociferous minority of parents and other people tangentially associated with our program. Not that I blame them (the parents that is - don't get me started on the media), because I'm a parent too, and Willow herself has been under the care of this individual while at camp. You see, he was the only other employee to have my job description. He was the night supervisor at our second site. Willow went there as a camper last year. Of course, there are parents who seem to lack perspective. Maybe they've fallen prey to the media fear mongering, or maybe they're just easily upset. Willow mentioned that one of moms of a softball teammate won't even let her daughter go to sleepovers anymore (which has nothing to do with our camp at all) due to this news.

Speaking of Willow, one of my first thoughts upon hearing about the arrest was how to break the news to her. Sophie had been standing right next to me when I took the call, and I couldn't tell her what had happened. She knew something bad had happened, but all I could manage to do was reassure her that nobody had died or been injured. In the end, it turned out that I didn't have to break the news to any of the children in my life. The news was all over all of the schools by the next day. There is more than one way a child predator can rip away innocence. This is the indirect way.

All of our employees go through the standard background checking procedure. Even our volunteers are fingerprinted (with the exception of the ones who aren't adults yet). This obviously isn't foolproof. In the interim weeks, the Office of Education (which oversees our program) has been doing its own investigation into our past safety procedures, our director (my boss) has been forced into a leave of absence while the investigation is happening, and a security company has been hired to provide extra staffing for each site at night. So, for the past few weeks, I've been sharing my space with an elderly security guard whose main conversational gambit has been about how things are cheaper in India. He is a nice guy, although we don't have much in common, and his presence cuts into my alone time. Being an introvert, I seriously value my alone time, but we do what we must. This morning, it being the end of the school year, I shook hands with him and we parted ways. I don't imagine we'll continue having actual security guards on site, but I'll always have some sort of company during my shift from now on. The policy of having only one person awake at night at each site is permanently at an end. The vacant position at our second site is currently a rotating one, with staff members filling in as they can. Other changes are in the offing as well. Our reliance on low-risk offenders to do janitorial work is at an end, as the whole weekend work program has been canceled (this despite the fact that it's pretty common practice for educational institutions to take advantage of this program - Eva's school does, for example). Time will tell what the permanent changes will be. It's a work in progress, and what all of the consequences will be, we don't yet know.

I refuse to link to the news stories here, but they can be found with a few clicks and the relevant search words. I could write more, but I think I've gotten this off my chest now, so I'll end here.