Before the school offered a BASE (before and after school) program, a mom offered daycare only after school. Well, there was one mom that had a hard time paying her so stopped using her and put the kids on the city bus. That didn't work and in the middle of Jan. her 2 kids were standing outside for at least two hours waiting for Mom. (It gets better!) The Principal was so upset she brought the kids in and warmed them up, the Mom yelled at her for doing so! SO the next day, same cold blistery day and there the kids were outside waiting for mom. So this time the school called our DARE officer to come and sit with the kids. He is really nice, normally, but he was NOT very nice sitting from 4:00 till almost 6:00 with these 2 kids! The hardest part, no cell, no home phone, no emergency contacts, NO ONE could be contacted to help this mom! SHe had three more run ins with Officer Bob before getting her act together. It's just sad.
When I worked preschool, we had a grace period of 20 minutes in which the parent would be charged $5.00. After that, the parent was charged $1.00 per minute and the teacher waiting got to keep the money. At 1 hour the director would call the police and have the child picked up by SS. As you can probably guess, we didn't have many late pickups!! Just be carefull to leave room for real emergencies (car accidents, ER visit,etc..)
2 hours late!!!??? I think DSS would've needed to be contacted if this was a habit and there was no emergency. I cannot imagine. One time is understandable, traffic is backed up, held up at work, whatever but 15 minutes is still a long time to me. I hate it for those kids but what else can you do?
We do not have this problem with our programs. Unfortunately our ESS has been cut down to 2 days there are buses that run for that, but our Before and After Care has never experienced any problems like that to my knowledge.
One of the things I'd like to see when we begin to see daylight is for our PTO to sponsor enrichment programs. I don't know how the powers that be would feel about this, but with all the cut backs....
How do you do that? Do you have volunteers or does the supervising person get paid?
Our parent group sponsors a number of various afterschool activities. On the sign up forms, we do have warnings that if you are more than 15 minutes late in picking up your child from the program for two times, your child will no longer be allowed to participate. Despite this, we still had many late pickup problems. One night, one of the officers sat with a kid for *2 hours* before he was picked up! And we did follow our late pickup policy--a couple of kids were kicked out of the programs.
The people who are always 10-15 minutes late are one thing, but we seem to have people who are much later than that. Usually only once, and with extenuating circumstances, but still....
I'm wondering if anyone has any successful policies about this they'd like to share, or good wording about your pickup policy on the program registration forms? What do you do if you have someone who hasn't been picked up for a very long period of time (and you can't reach the parent or emergency contact)?
One idea I had was to build in a refundable deposit to the registration fee--if you didn't have any late pickups, then you would get the deposit back at the end of the program. But that idea seems to have it's share of drawbacks. Looking for the silver bullet....
