day camp, by committee

[Zoe Girl]

Okay this sucks. And what really sucks is that I have seen this situation coming and it simply is not one where I can suck it up or fix it myself. Hopefully it is not confusing for those of different type work. There are days when there is no school and my department offers day camp on those days at a few schools. This year the department moved the person who had done all camps for 15 years to a new position and now we have a committee. I was invited to the committee and it actually has some benefits, but there are big gaps and the site I am running is getting the brunt of it. This is a bit of a vent, so thank you in advance.

My biggest issue is that I do not have enough staff (we start 6:30 am Monday). I can do a lot of things but duplicating myself and being with 2 groups of kids at the same time is not one of my skills. I have learned that if everyone in the program is 'in ratio' (responsible solely for a group of kids) and no one else is available then sometimes things go badly. I may possibly have enough staff now, I have never worked with them before and they were hired so late they have never seen the curriculum. I also have no idea the quality of the people who are acting as a one-on-one for an autistic child who runs. there is no central person to make sure we have staff. Since Monday I have been sending out emails asking all supervisors for more staff and sharing a spreadsheet of my current staffing. I was asked Friday afternoon if the other supervisor and I could work both days and act as one of the staff the whole time. That easily means 50 hours that week.

Friday at 4 I am still not fully staffed and getting calls. At 3:45 my day gets the busiest and stays like that until 5:30, I had to cut off a supervisor trying to help because it was the busy time. How does she not know this? Then I get 3 phone calls about where supplies are ( I ordered them) and it took 3 people to find clearly labeled boxes in the warehouse that I had already sent a detailed email about to all supervisors and camp sites. It simply did not need to be this last minute crisis when I sorted and labeled all camp supplies on Tuesday, and everyone in the department should know that between 3 ish and 5:30 we are super busy. I have been through this with this supervisor for a couple years now, so I don't feel bad for cutting her off.

I had to tell everyone they could call or email over the weekend. There is no other way, and I have a strong boundary around weekend work. I need to check for messages, I got 2 back to back calls before 8 am today (Saturday) and I refuse to pick up that early.

Going forward, I need to address this in the committee meeting. The meeting is supposed to be during camp and I declined it but was told I should be able to be at the meeting by the same person who things I can work as a staff and all will be fine. I have realized I don't have a filter on my mouth at times, but I also do not have a filter on my face. Every emotion shows, so the reason for the venting here. I have a list of things we need to clarify, and am concerned my total pissed off attitude may show easily.

And I need to ask for something I think. I want a flex day off. Even to the point of giving someone my cell phone and totally disengaging. A real day off rather than flexing time but still being on call by phone. I am looking at the calendar now.

Thank you for listening, anyone want to share how committee work sometimes is not the best choice for all types of work?

[mschrisgo2]

Wow, just, Wow. I can feel your frustration as I read this, and as a classroom teacher, I know you are completely right and justified. Clearly there needs to be a site supervisor/in-charge person (you), and enough others to cover the groups of kids. Not sure where you live but I know California, where I am, has very strict laws about this exact issue. All it takes is for one kid to get hurt, or the runner to take off, and you will then have unsupervised kids while an adult deals with the crisis. That's unsafe and out of compliance. IMHO, you are/were being very reasonable and logical, and trying to work within a ridiculous system. I would have simply said, "we need to cancel x number of kids because we don't have adequate supervision." If they fire you for that, you would certainly be entitled to unemployment at the least and probably more, because you were upholding the child welfare and safety laws.

No parent wants their kids' safety at risk because some "committee" can't get it together. A "committee" is a recipe for passing the buck, and that's exactly what they are doing. If something happens, I'm afraid you personally are going to get blamed, because you've taken the most responsibility, which totally sucks! Don't know how badly you need this job, but personally, I'd be gone. It can't be worth the aggravation, angst, and stress. One accident/compliant and your career with children is over. Surely there is some where else that you can make a contribution to the health and welfare of children?

[Zoe Girl]

Yeah, you understand the systems in education. I WILL be covered on Monday even if I have to call in the supervisors. Really frustrating process. The good news is that I am in my 5th year here so I have some credibility and effectiveness overall. I love my job and I have always managed to be 'in ratio' , just argh! I have been pushing towards improvements in lowering how many times we deal with things in crisis mode instead of reasonably working ahead. We have had some improvements but this committee work has set us back. I did get my meeting free Fridays!! I have a life again (by job is on call 6 am to 6 pm with flex the middle of the day).

So I am slowly on my way towards a new career that will take over a year to get there. I am planning towards the time it is likely that people burn out in education careers.

[Miss Cellane]

Coming at your problem from a purely business point of view, why can't you (or someone with the authority), just tell staff that they will be working on a given date? If that's not part of their job description now, it certainly should be. Just doing that--getting the authority to tell your employees when they will be working--would take a lot of the pressure off you. You can always ask for volunteers first, if you like, and then fill in with assigned personnel.

If there is no central person to make sure you have staff, bring this up to the committee and tell them it is necessary. Don't ask, tell. The person could be you, but in that case, make it clear that you will not be taking on other responsibilities as well. In fact, write out a list of all the responsibilities and make sure everyone on the committee takes on one or more of them--and make sure everyone on the committee has a list of names, phone numbers and responsibilities.

People contact you at your busiest time of day? Let their calls go to voice mail, if possible. People call about something you have already sent them an email about? Refer them to the email and hang up.

You teach people how to treat you. If you feel responsible for every single detail and help everyone solve every problem, people will ask for your help more and more, because contacting you is fast and easy--for them. If you refer them to the correct person/email/resource document, they will learn that it is faster and easier--for them--to check their email and look at their resource guides first, and only contact you if there is still a problem.

People look for the quickest and easiest way to solve problems. It sounds as if you have become the problem solver for the group. You need to make yourself the second tier of help, after the resources that they already have.

[sweetana3]

Miss Cellane, right on.

"Teach them to help themselves, dont solve their problems for them."

[Zoe Girl]

Okay i sat with this awhile. The details sometimes get in the way, but I do not answer my phone except this one case. And this is a scheduled day off for staff and they can get extra hours, usually we have a long list of staff wanting to work so we may need to change this based on what happened. This was going to be directly my problem so that changes things, and I could really feel the difference because I have developed good and appropriate boundaries over the last few years. Teaching people how to treat you is not an overnight process.

Going forward, we are having a meeting tomorrow and I have to decide how to approach some of this stuff. I tend to show everything on my face and I want to think about that. I am thinking one way to follow up is to talk about some of the issues outside of the meeting. The issue I am thinking of is that both my co-worker and fellow camp supervisor and I were 'in ratio' for the full 12 hours on Monday and half the day on Tuesday. I was able to leave on Tuesday at least but he stayed since I did most of the camp prep work. So I want to tell the supervisors who are also on the committee that it is not okay and I won't do it again or ask anyone else to do this. In the group I can say we need a central staffing person and share how hard it was for us. I am open to feedback on doing both some of the conversation in the committee and some privately.

One habit I am noticing is that i really want to say things about how my health can't do much of this (I am not ill, just feel effects like anyone else) or how my home life was affected or something. Those seem like bad ideas, they would make me seem more needy and incapable than assertive. Like I said, I have been working on this for years and I have had real progress, this entire event has shown me some places I could work on.

[mschrisgo2]

My suggestion would be to focus on the safety and well-being of the kids. Being supervised by someone who worked 12 hours straight the day before doesn't seem very safe; I know I don't always make good decisions when I'm exhausted, and I don't think I'm an exception to the rule.

[Miss Cellane]

Yes, leave your personal needs out of the meeting.

It might help if you have everyone in the committee identify what they think worked for the day camp and what didn't work. Then you will all know what needs to be changed for next time.

There are a variety of ways to get staff to work, although now that I know it was a scheduled day off I can see why you had problems getting people to work.

Going forward, can you just tell everyone that they will have to work at least one (or two or three, depending on how often you have the camps) camp day, and they can either sign up now or wait to be assigned? Or tell everyone on the committee they are responsible for getting X number of people to work on the camp days. Something so that it isn't only your problem--spread the work out.

Why are you doing most of the camp prep work? Again, that should be handed out to various members of the committee.

Zoe, I think you work very hard to do a good job with the kids you are responsible for. But from several of your posts, I think you need to delegate more tasks to others. Recognize that they may not do a good job the first time around. But the only way they will ever learn to do a good job is to try, and try again.

You have a committee. Use them.

[Zoe Girl]

Thank you Miss Cellane. We had 5 camp sites and really we are only responsible to work 1 or 2 ourselves. My prep work was just for my camp site and my partner is totally new to this so it was his learning experience. So this is actually not going to affect me directly much after this except being on the committee I don't want this to happen to another (and less experienced) person. I am hoping the meeting we have in 30 minutes will spend time on things like what we need to fix and have a strong facilitator this time. I have some some facilitating and it goes well, only one person tends to steamroll the conversations so I keep bringing that up with her but she is also a supervisor. Our conversations can gt unproductive without a strong facilitator.

Argh delegating! So I totally let other people be in charge of their parts, did not check up on them, trusted the committee. That meant I was standing there with about 50 kids at camp, no way to step out, and they did not order paper, pencils or markers for camp. It was a comic book theme. The responses I got when we were able to text someone were unhelpful and unrealistic. My new supervisor drove over 2 reams of paper on Tuesday morning thank goodness. I am typically very understanding but when there is a supervisor checking plans and orders I am pretty pissed off to be stuck and have no process on how to fix the problem. I left Tuesday, passed off my plans, kids and materials to some lovely staff, and did not check back in. They were fine.

[Valley]

How did your meeting go Zoe Girl? I've been thinking about you. My job was very similar to yours. I remember juggling 400 children and their parents. Though I loved my job, I am very happy to be retired!!:)

[Zoe Girl]

Thanks Valley, well interesting in ways. One great moment in the meeting was that I got a good group compliment about how I ran my theme planning group (we had 3 planning groups) and how good our projects were. I also heard from kids who went to another site and did my theme that they loved it. Yeah, so I offered support to the theme planning for the next dismissal day that I do not work and got to help search out the best fake vomit crafts. That is the good part of the job, creating programming and training/supporting staff.

For the rest of it, Well in the meeting and reflecting we got to share 2 positives and one challenge. I said staffing in my challenge of course without being super negative or detailed. the person that dropped the ball on plans and supplies that affected me did say she knew there were problems and she took responsibility. That is the best way for that to go. I left the end of the meeting to be part of the support to theme plan the next one so I tried to talk to my supervisor in the hall between things. I just said I wanted to make sure the staffing process and safety net was on the agenda for the next meeting, but I started it by saying that I was in ratio for 11 hours the first day. Her response was that I was not, she visited and I walked away from my group. Yes, for 10 minutes and I left a lovely young lady with CP in charge who hadn't looked over the plans before she walked in to work. The conversations go like that with her, I am getting more clear that if something is very important that I need to make 3 attempts to really get understood. There was an optional meeting after that and I said I didn't think I had time, got pressured to go, then went to leave with 10 minutes left and still got pressure but left anyway.

So she (J) is in an odd way my supervisor, but I have another one (K) who is slightly below her in heirarchy. I think I am going to primarily work with K and in a professional manner not need anything from J. I see more of the verbal patterns and attitudes and how those play out which really helps me set boundaries and do quality work. I will say without having K around I would be justifiably frustrated. The perception of my work and the expectations have come from J without a lot of oversight the last 2 years.