Puttin' Up My Mom Dukes

I got home late Monday night from my trip, and Alex and Nathan we very upset.  

I love the middle school my boys attend, except for the whole parking lot, drop off, pick up nightmare.  I have to turn left onto the busy street that the school is on.  A stream of cars zip by in both directions and there are no stop signs or lights, making it nearly impossible to turn.  Then, once I manage to get to the parking lot, I have to turn left again on the same busy street to exit the lot.  Nightmare!  So we have developed another system.  There is an alternative high school just across the street from the middle school. The boys cross the busy street at the crosswalk, then wait at that parking lot.  I just slip into that parking lot before I get to the busy street, they jump in, and we exit the parking lot, turning right and avoiding the busy street all together.  It works out nicely for us, and for several other parents that we know who come from that direction that do the same thing.  Hey, fewer cars on that busy street - better for everyone right?  We have been doing this for a year and a half.

Well, on Monday, since I was gone, Dennis had to pick them up.  He told the boys to wait by the sign of the alternative school in the corner of the parking lot.  That is not where they usually stand, but whatever.  So while they are just sitting there waiting, the security guard came up to them and started yelling at them and accusing them of vandalism, trespassing, and on and on!  He told them that they had no right to be there, that they had been warned before, and that if they ever stepped foot on that property again he'd have them expelled. At then end of reaming them he said, "This warning is not for you.  It is for your parents."  Excuse me?  He was just mean, and he scared them to death.  He called the security guard of the middle school to escort them back to the middle school.   They was upset and confused, and worried that if they weren't at the sign, their dad wouldn't know where to find them.  Well, he found them of course, but when they told me about it I was furious!

I didn't sleep much that night.  How dare he!  Those are young boys, 11 & 12, and he scarred them to death.  If there is one thing I hate, it is people who treat all juveniles as if they are delinquents - people who assume that all young people are trouble.  My boys were confused.  They didn't really know what they had done wrong and were so afraid of what tomorrow would bring.  Alex doesn't deal with change well, and he was worried about how and where I would pick them up.  

The next day when  went to pick them up I found them trudging down the street toward home.  It was 99 degrees and Nathan was schlepping his heavy saxophone.  I picked them up and headed right into the infamous parking lot looking for that rotten security guard.  I had HAD it.  He was no where to be found, so I marched into the alternative school and demanded to talk to the principal.  He was in a meeting so I left my cell phone number, and marched across the street to the middle school where I talked to a counselor, so that they could be aware of what was going on.  I explained to her the whole situation with the busy street and pick up.  She agreed that it is a nightmare, and that the principal has been fighting with the City for two years to get some sort of traffic signal installed.  She agreed with me that yelling at those kids was uncalled for, and that there were much better ways for the security guard to handle this, and he was out of line.  She agreed to have the principal talk to the other principal.  I was so grateful that she was so nice.

Later I got a phone call from the principal of the alternative school, and I explained the whole situation to him.  I told him that if they had some kind of policy not to pick my kids up there, we had NEVER heard it before, and that the security guard was completely out of line.  If he had a "message for the parents" he could have politely and respectfully explained to the kids that they needed to tell their parents to pick them up somewhere else from now on, OR he could have passed out a letter to each of them to give to their parents explaining their policy, OR BETTER YET, he could have waited until the parents drove up to pick up the kids, and then talked to the parents about the problem.  The principle absolutely agreed with me and explained that in fact, it wasn't a policy, and that he had absolutely no problem with parents avoiding the fray of the busy street by picking up the kids in his parking lot, and that is was just that they had been having problem lately of kids vandalizing their sign, and the security guard was just taking it out on my boys.  I said that if my kids had been causing trouble then, by all means, scare them to death!  I am not one of these parents who defends their brats.  But these were good kids who where obediently doing just what their parents told them - to stay right there and wait.  The principal agreed with me.

I also told him that I have always tried to teach my children that we respect cops because they are there to help us, and at this age, my kids really don't understand the difference between a security guard and a cop.  They all wear a badge.  What this guy was doing was flying in the face of everything that I had been trying to teach them.  The principal was very nice and agreed to talk to the security guard.  He assured me that as long as the kids stayed away from the sign, it was perfectly fine to continue picking them up in his parking lot, and that as long as they stood there nicely nobody would ever give them any more trouble about it.

Wonderful!  I was so relieved, and it felt so good to report to my kids that everyone had agreed that they had done nothing wrong.  I was so glad I didn't just let this one slide. They are good boys, and I am so grateful for that.  It felt so good to put up mu dukes and defend my kids, and it was good for them to see me do it, too.