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Chapter 4: There Are Many Legitimately Good Kids and Workers, but They Get Screwed Over the Most

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It may have come to a shock to some readers that I stated I at times worked 14 hour shifts. The sad thing is that this isn't uncommon at all. In fact with most house staff, especially those in the teenage home, working shifts that exceed a dozen hours is the rule. This is how the overnight shift typically worked for me when I was in the teenage home. I would come in at 8:00pm and would greet the staff on duty. Typically the staff had been there since 9:30am or 11:00am at the very latest. They were then scheduled to stay until at least 10:00pm. I say "at least" because most of the time I would have been scheduled to be by myself for an hour after they were suppose to leave. So many times one of them was nice enough to stay. I was in the home until 9:30am or 10:00am in the morning when the same staff that I greeted when I started my shift, now greeted me. I then exited the home to come into work again later that night where the exact same thing will occur. The hours they have people work for their shifts is insane.

Now to be fair, I did get overtime for my shift, I put "I" because I know of at least two coworkers whose overtime would frequently "forget to be counted". To me the extra overtime wasn't that big of a deal, because "why not make more money?" However, it was downright very stressful for a lot of the staff. Primarily the "afternoon shift" staff. Many of them had kids and were single parents. The main reason the staff gave me why they couldn't stay an extra hour so I wouldn't be alone wasn't because they had already been working for a dozen hours, it was because they had to pick up their kids from the sitter or were worried about things like their kids may be engaging in questionable activities since they were away from home for so long.

I always found it ironic and a little sad that rather than being home raising their kids, they have to spend their time raising someone else's who didn't even spend an ounce of effort trying to parent and support their kids the way that the staff do. You would expect that there would be some sort of appreciation from them doing this. Well they don't, if anything they get criticized. You see there is a reason why they have to work such long hours, it is because we are always severely short staffed. The reason why the staff come so early is because they are the only ones scheduled the entire day. The entire day only two or three people, at most, were working. The frightening thing is that this isn't even the most shocking thing about the schedule. Up until very recently before I left the job, the teenage house was only staff by women. There were no men present. The only men on campus were scheduled in the child home. So two, or three at most, women had to run the entire home of ten boys, most of them taller than six feet and over 200lbs, by themselves. You can imagine how that went. The boys turned up their disrespect to an eleven and would regularly walk out of their rooms and do whatever they wanted. To be fair, things could have been much much worse, but the women working were very capable. While they couldn't discipline the boys physically that did their best to do so verbally. They would often get into the boys faces and tell them like it is. They would constantly go over how the boys were being disrespectful and how their actions are affecting their futures. While this did work on a few boys, particularly the youngest and smallest ones, it did jack shit for the large and more disrespectful ones. The house often went into chaos regularly.

So what does the management do when they hear about how chaotic the house is being due to the fact that they are so low on staff? "Pick yourselves up by your bootstraps!" Constantly in meetings this argument was used. They would often bring up how they never had any problems dealing with kids when they were on duty therefore the staff shouldn't either. As if everyone has the same strengths and skills as everyone else has. It was made even more infuriating that of staff that said this was 6'6 while the other, which was a woman, primarily worked with small children. None of them had the experience of working with a group of boys who largely outclassed them by size.

Their main argument boiled down to that it was up to the staff on duty to figure out a game plan and their own treatment program. As if that should even be their responsibility to begin with. There's a reason why management is called management, it is their job to manage the program. Miraculously this is what the staff did. They themselves created their own program. It seemed great on paper. However, once they began implementing pieces of it they came to a stunning, and obvious, realization. It couldn't implemented, the reason was because they were too short staffed. There weren't enough staff to run the program they created which revolved around taking the kids to activities, processing with them about their troubles and behaviors, and setting up in house events. A program revolving around basic stuff such as talking with the kids, taking some of them to a sports complex, and having board game night couldn't be done because they just didn't have enough staff to calm the few disruptive kids down during transition time. So after management saw the staff's plan of creating their own program crash and burn, what did they do? Continued to blame the staff for not trying hard enough. May I remind you that one of the management staff was the male program manager who was scheduled to come in at 4:00pm every weekday who never did. And here he is criticizing the house staff for not doing a job properly that he is suppose to be doing in the first place!

Unfortunately it isn't just the good staff who get screwed over. While I spent a lot of time talking about bad kids, there are a lot of kids that I felt were legitimately good kids. Types of kids that I enjoyed seeing and talking to every day and still miss. I generally divide kids up to four groups. The first are kids who have very little if anything wrong with them. They may have had many run ins with their parents and have some types of baggage such as becoming a bit irritated by their peers or other quirks. However, they certainly don't qualify for being taken away from a reasonable home. The second are kids who have some mental problems, such as autism, but can be treatable if you give them proper time and care. The third are kids who have a significantlmental dysfunction, these kids often were born drug positive and are just completely mentally destroyed. They belong in a mental hospital due to such. The fourth and final kids are those who should just be sent to jail. This may upset some diehard liberals, but the fact of the matter is that some people just simply need to go to jail. I saw with my own eyes tons of kids who got chance after chance after chance who continued to not give a shit.

Let me make this clear, the latter two types of kids always screw over the former two. Instead of staff giving the former two kids the treatment and care they deserve, the latter two always get all the attention. There just isn't enough staff to properly manage the household to give focus to every, or even most kids. Often times when I worked , a partner and I would be the only two people in the house and we would be trying to calm a storm one or two kids are causing, while ignoring everyone else. It is always the same kids causing these storms which results in the same kids being ignored.

Due to the latter two kids always acting like asshats, this effects the routine and rules of the house. Kids spend a large amount of time in their rooms and they aren't allowed to leave them without permission. This may not seem so bad on text, but in practice it can have some pretty shitty effects. The most common diagnosis of the residents by far is ADHD. They often have difficulty focusing and staying in one place at a time. Add the fact that some of these kids are as young as nine years old and couple that they have to stay at the rooms for sometimes a few hours straight and you have yourself a recipe for disaster. The vast majority of crises I had to deal with involved young children with ADHD not wanting to be in their rooms. In fact when I worked with a certain coworker in which we had a mutual agreement to allow the kids out of their rooms at times, the amount crises took a nosedive.

At worst sometimes "you have to be in your room" mantra can be a constant thing. Most residents are assigned a roommate, as you can imagine most of the roommates don't get along spectacularly well.It is common for roommates to argue and one of them begin to freak. They then attempt to run out of their rooms, and with staff being afraid that the kid may run out of the house, they have to keep them in their room through any means necessary. Never mind that the child is likely angry because he doesn't want to be in a room anymore with someone who recently took a shit in their closet, rather than wanting to leave the room just because he feels like it. Add on the fact that outings are rare due to not being able to take all or most of the kids, and the whole collective punishment mentality I touched upon earlier, and you get lot of good kids getting the shit end of the stick.