Put a group of kids together and problems are bound to happen. Little three-year-old Suzy put a glue bottle up her nose and it took EMT workers to remove it; 16-year-old Johnny decided to order a pizza at 3 a.m. and the chaperone awakened by the call to come get it was not amused.
Those are the stories that lead to a chuckle and a shake of the head. But there are others that can make your blood run cold.
And even if they haven’t happened to you, just the thought that they could is enough to wake you in the middle of the night: sexual predators on the prowl at a teen conference, a tornado or a hurricane ravaging a city while your convention group is in house, a sniper in the building where the children are…
“My number-one biggest stress, and the reason I have gray hair, is worrying about how to best protect the children we are responsible for in a public setting,” says Nita Leckenby, co-director with her husband Stephen Leckenby of Children’s Conferences International, a Graham, Texas-based company that provides biblically-based children and youth programming at Christian events worldwide.
She’s not alone in her worries, with good reason.
A Different World
The country was shocked in the mid-1990s, when allegations of sexual misconduct rocked the Catholic Church. As the full scope of the problems became more clear—and as it became known that even those believed to be the most “trusted” of adults could not always be trusted with children—other religious institutions had to take a good hard look at what was going on in their own backyards.
For many, horror hardened into resolve to take action. One of them was Joy Melton, an ordained minister with the United Methodist Church and a partner in the Atlanta law firm Hindson & Melton LLC. She is also author of the 1998 book “Safe Sanctuaries: Reducing the Risk of Child Abuse in the Church,” published by Children’s Ministries. She also wrote a 2001 follow-up book, “Safe Sanctuaries for Youth: Reducing the Risk of Abuse in Youth Ministries.”
“In 1996, at our general conference meeting, the United Methodist Church adopted a resolution calling on all United Methodist Churches to work to prevent child abuse in our ministries,” says Melton. “We were beginning to hear a lot of stories in the news about cases in other denominations, and we decided to be proactive and passed this resolution, part of which called for the development of written resources to assist all groups involved with children as they planned for safety.”
For others, the resolve to formalize their safety procedures came as a result of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, the terrorism attack in 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, or most recently, the shootings at Virginia Tech.
As a part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Jerry Mapstone, executive director of Lancaster, Pennsylvania–based Life Impact Ministries, has overall responsibility for a convention for teenagers aged 13 through 18. The event, held every three years, is expected to draw about 10,000 people this summer, including about 1,500 adult sponsors.
“Twenty-four years ago, when I started doing this, our biggest concerns were health issues and making sure the kids were in their rooms at night,” he says. “But now it’s a whole different set of concerns. I certainly never had to worry back then that a large group of children might be a magnet for someone to come in and intentionally create harm. It never occurred to us that someone with a gun would want to enter our convention. I know those things sound far-fetched, but it’s my responsibility to think of those things.”
Planning Ahead
While there are obviously events that cannot be prevented by any measures, meeting planners who hold events that include children have even greater responsibilities when it comes to putting policies and procedures in place to protect the children as much as possible.
“Since the terrorist attack of 2001, the biggest questions we get from parents relate to safety and security,” says Mapstone. “Parents are concerned about letting their children go far from home and we understand that and know that we have to do everything we can to ensure their safety.”
For Mapstone, this starts with the initial site selection. “From the moment we first consider a city, we look at the experiences of other groups in the area, crime statistics, even weather conditions.” For example, with their meeting slated for Orlando this summer, one of the group’s concerns was hurricanes. Although the risks are not great enough to preclude selecting Orlando, Mapstone did create a contingency plan for the first time to address how the group would handle a hurricane as well as other safety issues. “We’ve been doing this kind of planning informally all along,” he says, “but this is the first year we’ve created a formal plan, which will be distributed to our whole team.”
Chuck Wallace, national conferences director of Student Venture, the high-school outreach of Campus Crusade for Christ, also takes site selection very seriously. His group typically puts together four summer conferences and eight winter conferences around the country for 200 to 500 high school students. “The first thing we do is talk the hotel to find out who else will be there and what else is going on at that time,” he says. “We’ve had hotels tell us honestly that there are weeks we don’t want to come, that those are weeks when they are likely to have a lot of kids and drinking in house, and that’s not a good environment for us.”
The physical plan of the space can also be especially important when kids are involved. Melton, for example, says that she was recently at a convention center that encompassed 16 different buildings. “We didn’t have children at that particular meeting so it wasn’t an issue, but that would have been a very difficult setup for childcare because it was all so spread out.”
Similarly, Leckenby says the first thing she does is look at the layout of a facility to see if a children’s program is even feasible there. “We have to see how secure it is to begin with,” she says. “How many entrances and exits are there to the space we’ll be using? Is the area large enough for the number of children we anticipate? Are the bathrooms inside our space or will we have to leave that area and enter a public space to take kids to the bathroom? How far is the space from where the parents will be?”
Who's on First
Nothing, though, is as critical as the choice of the right people to be working with the children. That’s a primary focus of Melton’s books, and the accompanying training DVDs, which are used by religious organizations of all denominations (available on Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, as well as directly from the publisher at www.UpperRoom.org).
“The resources in the books include a systematic protocol for screening volunteers and employees so that a church or religious institution can really do due diligence in their selection process,” says Melton. For example, she advises having anyone who will work with the children fill out a written application, which should be followed up by checking references and a criminal background check.
That’s the process that Wallace follows with all staff. “We are now hiring a company to do background checks on anyone who works at the conference, even if they’re just in the office and wouldn’t typically come in contact with the kids. That’s new within the past few years.” Also new is the group’s no-exception rule to the background checks. “In the past we might have left it up to the city director to vouch for the person coming if it was a later addition, especially if it was someone they’d known since high school or if they knew the person’s parents,” he says. “But we now feel it’s most prudent to do a background check on anyone who is volunteering. Even though it creates extra work for us, it’s an across-the-board decision and we don’t have to worry about exceptions.”
He does, however, note that when sponsors come directly from a church group with a group of kids, it’s up to the individual church to vet the sponsors. “The churches have their own guidelines in place for sponsors,” says Wallace. Similarly, if you’re hiring a company to provide childcare or education, it’s important to ascertain what kind of screening procedures they’ve done themselves.
“Ask questions about their risk control measures,” says John S. Foster, Esq., CHME, an attorney whose Atlanta-based firm Foster, Jensen & Gulley, LLC specializes in the legal aspects of meetings and conventions. “Does the company carefully screen their employees? Are criminal checks done? Are employees trained in first aid and CPR? Is employee training an ongoing priority for the company? After checking out a supplier’s reputation, risk is transferred to the professional providing the service with a written indemnification and hold harmless agreement.”
Rules, Rules, Rules
While careful screening of employees can reduce the risk, a set of policies and procedures is also essential. Leckenby, who works with children aged 5 to 12, has strict rules for drop-off and pick-up of the children. “The first thing we do is make sure all doors to the space are locked except for one set where parents drop off their kids and another set where parents pick up their kids,” she says. That way there can’t be any surprises with an uninvited adult just showing up.
Registration takes place outside of the doors, and in addition to the venue security, Leckenby has her own people, including a police officer, positioned there. At registration, parents sign their kids in and get a pass that allows them to enter the room. “No pass, no entrance,” says Leckenby. “We’ve had situations where people really were the parents, but we couldn’t let them enter because they didn’t have the pass. There are no exceptions.”
This is the time when parents talk with a team leader to learn more about the process and what the kids will be doing that day, and are also handed an exit pass, which will allow them to exit with their child at the end of the day. With divorces, child custody issues, and child snatching, it’s crucial for Leckenby to know if both parents actually have permission to pick up a child and to only issue the pass for those who are there in person.
And those are just the beginnings of the rules. There are medical forms to be filled out, allowing Leckenby to get care for an injured child, food and allergy information forms, rules and procedures for escorting a child to the restroom, and training for how to handle an unexpected emergency. “We had to evacuate 500 kids just a few weeks ago when a fire alarm went off,” says Leckenby. “We were able to do it in less than four minutes.”
Older Kids Need Rules Too
Even with older kids, rules are key, especially when it comes to housing. “Our kids come in groups from their churches,” says Mapstone, “and we require one adult, who’s at least 21, of the same sex as the kids for every six kids. The adult sponsors have all been approved by the pastors or governing body of the church that sends them.” Sometimes the adults share a room with the kids; sometimes not, but Mapstone says the group strongly discourages adults from ever sharing a bed with a student.
Wallace’s high school students also share rooms, but with stringent guidelines. “We’ll fit as many kids in the room as we can, but our rule is that no students can ever share a bed with a fellow student they don’t already know.” Along the same lines, he says that adults always must have their own bed and they will not allow an adult to stay in a room at all unless they know all the kids previously. “The primary role of the adult leaders is to always know where every person in their group is,” says Wallace.
To protect both the students and the adults from even the appearance of impropriety, adults are never allowed to be alone with a student in a non-public area. “If they want to have an informal counselor session, for example, they can go to the snack bar or the restaurant or the lobby,” says Wallace, “but not a guest room. By the same token, I would never drive a student anywhere without making sure someone else was along.”
Security issues, too, are different for older kids, though no less important. Both Wallace and Mapstone hire their own security people to be inside a convention center or hotel in addition to the security provided by the venue (although they can’t always call these people “security” because of venue rules).
With Mapstone’s group of some 10,000 in a convention center, he hires several different layers of security. “We work with city officials to determine if we want to hire extra off-duty police beyond what they provide,” he says.
“We prefer to have a strong uniformed presence outside the venue as an immediate deterrent.” For inside the convention center, they hire a security firm, who checks badges before allowing anyone to enter. They also use adults who are not technically security but patrol the buildings. “As one possible deterrent to sexual predators or someone just walking in with a gun, for example, we work with security provided by the convention center and our team of people to patrol the public areas and the areas that our kids are in,” says Mapstone. “There are always several people on the lookout for any problems.”
With a smaller group of only a few hundred—but a more public location in a hotel—Wallace has different security issues, but a similar solution. “We have a security team, whose sole job is watch the area and be aware of what’s going on,” he says. “If we don’t recognize an adult, we immediately approach them to find out who they are, and ask them to leave if necessary.” That same team keeps an eye on discussion rooms while the kids are in sessions, helps ensure that all the kids are in their hotel rooms at lights out, and more informally keeps an eye on everything that’s going on.
“We have a lot of teenage girls in our group and it’s not unusual for an adult to have to step in and tell a young man who is not part of our group that the girl is not interested in him,” Wallace explains, “and as of that moment, he is no longer interested in her.”
One way both groups help keep track of who belongs is with some sort of visual identifier, whether a name badge on a lanyard or a wrist band. With younger kids, Leckenby strongly advises a name badge. “Not only does it help us keep track of them and identify them,” she says, “but if there’s any kind of medical issue or if for some reason children can’t tell us their names, we still know who they are.”
While everyone agrees that there’s no way to protect a child 100 percent, Mapstone believes that the rules he’s set in place and contingency planning he’s done “help provide a comfort zone for myself and the team and the churches, as well as the parents and the kids. We’re constantly checking up on ourselves. Our first job is to make sure there are no problems. But if there are problems, we’re also responsible for knowing how we’re going to handle them as effectively as possible.”
Copyright Collinson Publishing 2007. Reprinted with permission from the June issue of Rejuvenate, www.time2rejuvenate.com.