My mom mentioned seeing a sign in her local library that said:
Funny, but no the most practical solution. I agree with the others who mentioned calling the cops. They’ve had to deal with it before, and any parent that has to explain to a police officer why they couldn’t be bothered to pick their child up on time is going to be less likely to do it again.
Man, I hate when people act like “It takes a village” means everybody except them is responsible for their kids.
This is hardly the same thing, but my mom was habitually early picking me up. Besides the fact that it meant I didn’t get to taper off with my friends, saying “Bye…see you next time” and so forth (and it just plain made me look like a little baby), I’m sure it caused the staff some aggravation. If there were any announcements to be made, like “Next time bring a widget and two hacksaws”, they would have to stop what they were doing and give her the information, thereby disrupting their routine. Not as extreme as the examples given here, but the same principle: expecting others to work around her schedule.
Libraries hate this too. People, a library is a public place. Anyone can come into a library, and believe me, they do. The library is not a good place to dump your kids while you go do something without them, and librarians are not babysitters.
The library with the highest number of weirdos I ever worked in was the library where one evening, parents dropped off a six-year-old boy and zoomed away, 5 minutes before closing time. We took him to the police station across the street.
hmmm… I am appalled at the number of parents who believe that tutoring services, summer camps, and other child-service organizations are free babysitting services.
However, I do want to point out to the workers who are complaining that they can’t clock in more than 40 hours a week or they don’t get paid for the time they wait for parents - this is not the parent’s fault! The fookin’ employers should realize that this is a common occurance, and plan for it accordingly! IMO it’s as much the organization’s fault for counting on their staff to put in unpaid hours as it is the parent’s that you all have to work with out pay.
When Ivyboy and Ivygirl were in daycare, I was late a couple of times picking them up, due to traffic accidents on the way home.
This was before common use of cell phones, so I’d sit and fret as I inched along the road, panicking about the high cost the overtime was going to be.
But, when I got there, the directors understood, because seventeen other parents were also late.
I see nothing wrong with charging parents over time or sending the kids over to the police station. However, you need to warn parents of this new policy, so no one can scream they didn’t know about it. Have a form ready when they pick up their child, and have them sign that they received the form.
“Due to several instances of parents picking up their children late, we have had to institute a new policy…” blah blah blah. Remind them that you have lives too, and that the center closes at 7pm.
Keep a radio handy, so when it comes time to close, you can listen to traffic reports and know when parents can be stuck in traffic.
Would it be worthwhile for you to have parents’ cell phone numbers, so you can call when they are late? “Just checking, Mrs. Smith. Johnny was due to be picked up two hours ago.”
Good luck!
My kids go to the YMCA for after school care and they close at 6:30. If you are late it is $5 a minute and the way they get people to pay is once you have an unpaid bill, the kid is suspended from the program until it is paid. This means no pickup at school, parents have to leave work early to get kid or make alternate arrangements. They are good about waiving the fee, I have been late twice in 4 years both due to car or traffic trouble and they were ok with it.
Our center does as best as it can to schedule buisiness hours that are as convienient for our members as possible. Unfortunately, no matter how flexible we are, we are limited in how many hours/day we can keep the center open because of budget, and the availability factor always falls into a bell curve- there’s always going to be some people who’d rather us be open a little earlier/little later. The people who leave their kids late are a minority in the big picture, but that is why it is so noticible.
My old sitter would charge the $1 a minute late fee. I never had to pay it. I do know she had some parents that would throw an absolute fit every time they had to pay it though. They didn’t stay clients for long.
I agree with the calling the cops, particularly for repeat offenders. As for the issue of scaring the child, it shouldn’t. Cops are in the schools these days, kids are taught from a fairly young age that cops are friends, not somebody to be scared of.
I used to cop this coaching my son’s cricket team. Every practice ended when the last parent turned up to pick up their kid. In fact so that the kids didn’t feel bad about it I used tp pretend that practice just went on and on until the last kid left. Some parents would just dump their kids at the game on Saturday morning and if we won early it was my problem.
Nope, nope, nope.
It is the tardy parents creating the problem. No late parents, no problem. It is not anyone else’s responsibility.
The parents may be responsible for being late, but the employer is responsible for refusing to pay the employees for the extra time they work, and in the case of ** AwSnappity’s** camp, for making the hours such that it’s almost inevitable that people will drop off early and pick up late… Lets see , camp runs from 9:15 to 3:30. If I had to send my kid to a camp with those hours, my husband and I would probably be able to arrange our work schedules so one could drop off and the other could pick up, but it would be so tight timewise that getting stuck behind a garbage truck for a block would make me late.
Why should AwSnappity have to babysit during non-camp hours and then do the planning and organizing off the clock? The camp directors could do the babysitting, or take the children to the police or just pay AwSnappity for the actual number of hours worked ( as they most likely are required to do by law if it’s over 40). It might be the parent’s fault that they arrived late, but it’s the employer who is refusing to pay, yet wants both the babysitting and the planning done.
Another social worker chiming in…
Call Child Protective Services instead of the cops. Cops have more pressing things to do and CPS leaves a more lasting impression and a bigger file on the family.
Signed contracts with late fees attached is a great idea if you like the money over getting home on time. But in some cases, you maybe opening yourself up to being a daycare center inadvertantly and will be subject to state licensing in some cases. Check your state laws. I would make it a “three strikes” contract, with a verbal on the first occasion, a written on the second, and calling CPS on the third with stipulations that CPS can be called anytime after an hour has elapsed after closing time, on any occasion. After the the third occasion, it will be the sole decision of the director to decide whether or not the kid stays in the program or gets dropped. Always have two or more staff to look after the child afterhours so no retaliatory “my kid was abused in your program” allegations. If you do charge money for afterhours, tie it in with the cost of the staff to stay late, the electricity, heating/air conditioning, the phone calls made, anything except “child care” to play it safe. Also, have a copy of the signed contract handed to the parent each time their late as well, so the selective memory will become permanent memory.
We call APS (adult version of CPS) when our clients we serve in day program are not picked up by a certain time and it gets results quickly.
A slight hijack, but not really.
I spoke to a worker at my local Toys R Us once, and he intimated to me that it was very common to see children playing with toys in the aisles…all day long. :eek:
Apparently some parents drop their kids off at the TRU in the morning, and pick them up several hours later.
:mad: IT’S NOT A FRICKIN’ DAY CARE, YOU SHIT-SMEARS! :mad: Yes, your children probably are being parented better by the 17 year-olds that work at TRU, but this is still no excuse.
Christ on a pogo stick, if I ever heard about that happening, I’d have the police swing by around 4:00pm or so to have a “chat” with the parent when he/she came to pick up their widdle precious.
Yes, the parents are the problem, but it seems there are always people who will abuse the system. So you have to design a better system. Every daycare I’ve dealt with comes down hard financially and otherwise on late parents. At least a dollar a minute late fee, paid directly into the hand of the inconvenienced teacher/counselor AND a warning that the child will be suspended from the program if they keep it up. AwSnappity’s bosses are allowing their employees to take punishment for their bad management.
There was a mother who was 40 minutes late today. I was very close to calling the police.
I’ll agree with you that the organization is crappily run. Believe me, I’ll be the first to admit that.
Having said that, though, why on earth would you sign your child up for something that you can’t reasonably get to and from? At the very least, give us a heads-up that you’re going to be late so that we can plan accordingly. I don’t have even 15 minutes to spare! I don’t even get time to eat lunch during the day. Believe me, I’m packing in as much organizing and prep work on the clock as possible. Every spare second on the clock (and sometimes even several off) is spent doing work. I don’t have time to wait 10 or 15 or 30 or 40 minutes for you. (As I understand it, I’m not allowed to go over 40 hours period. I don’t get paid for the overtime I work. I get reprimanded for putting it on my time sheet. I get reprimanded for volunteering that time [and I fully understand why]. I just cannot work over 40 hours.)
We actually get a lot of SAHPs who sign their kids up for camp. I’ve never had problems with parents being consistently late, which leads me to believe that no one is having trouble picking up their kids due to work getting out at 4 or whenever. The bad thing about not having consistently late parents is that I can’t really scold them. I mean, I can say, “Please try to be on time in the future,” and they will, but there’s always a parent the next day or the next week who’s late. If it were only a few parents who were habitually late, then we could take action and possibly not let their child sign up for camp anymore. We do underscore pick-up and drop-off times–we send a note home with the children on the first day and we mention it at our first-day 5-minute parent meeting. This shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone.
Plus, our organization doesn’t have employees to spare (hijack: anyone in the SW Chicago burbs need a job? Although, after I’ve described all this, you probably don’t want to work here…)
<sigh>…8 more days…
One down, seven to go. Hang in there. I so understand your frustration. What about comp time??? How about some sort of schedule that would allow one person to come in an hour late and stay with these kids with tardy parents.
On a lighter note, this past season I had this terrific kid whose parents were frequently late. I got the impression that this was not a work related issue. Anyway, after a typical 13 hour day, I was ready to show tail lights. I harshly asked the kid why her parents were always late. She looked at me and said bluntly, “my parents are irresponsible”. We both cracked up. It seemed so odd hearing a fifteen year old saying that.
On an encouraging note… the work you do is important. It may not be appreciated by a few parents but most parents value what you do and you never know when you are unknowingly making a positive impression on the kids you work with. 
Just to add to the mix: one possible contributing factor is that local regulations may have a different child/worker ratio for daycare/sitting than they do for tutoring/camp/classes. If so, the camps could be much cheaper than daycare and might also get pressure to prove that they’re NOT daycare. Setting hours that would be inconveninent for most daycare needs would be a way of covering their regulatory backsides.
“You can’t require us to hire more people. We couldn’t possibly be daycare. Daycare would run from 7:30 to 6:00.”
I thought you were talking about consistently late parents. If it’s not a pattern, then you really won’t be able to solve it, because it doesn’t seem deliberate. Sometimes I think my kids’ grade school started an afterschool program at least partly to deal with the kids who weren’t picked up on time. Everyone knew what time dismissal was, and no one meant to be late, but in a school with 300 students you could count on someone being caught behind a garbage truck or blocked into their parking space or locking the keys in the car just about every day.
I agree.There has to be a distinction.If a parent is half an hour or an hour late but it’s due to a huge road accident,rail crash,roof blown off their house that’s different to a parent who strolls in ten minutes late just cos they couldn’t be bothered to make the effort and appear on time.
And at least if a parent has made the effort to ring and say ‘There’s a problem.I won’t be able to arrive until 6:15’.the staff might not be happy sitting there,but at least they know a) parent WILL be arriving at a certain time and b)they actually bothered to tell you
My sister works at her parish school’s after school, and they use the $1/min approach. After a certain point, they just tell the child they can’t use the service any more. It seems to work for them.
Chastain,
Show your Toys-R-Us friends the wisdom of the [Gord](http://www.actsofgord.com/Chronicles/chapter27.html). Funny stuff.