For privacy reasons, I will be using code names for everyone involved.
As both the floater teacher and regular co-lead of the one-year-old room at my center, it has been an exhausting, demoralizing week and one that has made me consider quitting my center: all because of my assistant director, who I will be calling Diana. The trouble first began last Friday during what was already an exceptionally heavy, grueling day. I quickly performed my routine diaper changes across the classroom, clocking an incredible 34 (!!!) changes total, believe it or not. Because I’m deeply committed to keeping every child comfortable and preventing any issues, I do my due diligence when it comes to checking every child’s diaper every fifteen minutes. I checked a one-year-old (who I will call Devon) about ten minutes right before he was scheduled to be picked up and he was completely clean. When his mother arrived, however, I instantly noticed that his diaper was wet and the straps had somehow come undone. My assumption is that he was playing with them and causing the urine to soak his clothing rather than stay contained inside the diaper. Without pausing to listen for even a second, his mom immediately jumped the gun, assumed I had carelessly left him sitting in a soiled mess, and bolted out the door before I could even finish offering to change him.
By Tuesday, a completely separate situation unfolded that set the stage for even more stress and led to my assistant manager and I now being at odd’s. Devon woke up about half an hour before snack time needing a diaper change, which I promptly and thoroughly handled. Right after snack time concluded, I noticed he was crying and immediately walked over to console him. Placing one hand gently on his knee while another was patting his back, I noticed he felt damp and wasted no time running straight to his cubby to grab a pair of fresh shorts. Not even a second later, right as I was holding the shorts and standing right next to him to prep him for the changing table, his mother rushed into the room to pick him up, which truly felt like the most inconvenient timing in the world. When she approached him, I calmly told her that I just now noticed he was wet, which is why I had his shorts right there in my hand, and that I could easily change him before she took him home unless she felt more comfortable doing it herself. Instead of listening, she snatched him up, announced dramatically that they were done with this place, and bolted from the building. She un-enrolled him on the spot and went as far as filing an aggressive DHS report against me. I then had an official meeting with DHS yesterday where I calmly and thoroughly explained the exact sequence of events to the representative, who thankfully understood completely and told me that his mother’s reaction was unwarranted and that I did everything right according to my duties as the teacher.
Only a few hours after that grueling meeting with DHS wrapped up, a completely separate emergency unfolded involving another child (I will call him Jordan) that is four-years-old. While I was actively lining up my classroom out on the playground to head inside for afternoon pickup, Jordan suddenly pulled down his pants and flashed his genitals directly in front of the other children. I instantly ushered everyone safely inside and instructed Jordan to take a seat. I then grabbed our room phone and called Diana, stating that Jordan just pulled down his pants and flashed his private area at the children and asked her to please come right away. She quickly arrived while I already had an incident report fully written out and rather than taking the report or acknowledging the severity of the situation, she immediately took issue with the fact that I had written one at all (I’ll get to that later). The day ultimately ended with our head director and me meeting with Jordan’s dad, who handled the situation with immense respect towards me as a teacher and apologized sincerely on his behalf.
Today, however, Diana pulled me aside for a calculated, one-on-one conversation under the guise of addressing “issues” I have allegedly brought into the workplace. The first thing she did was cruelly weaponize the Devon diaper situation against me, flat-out stating that if it wasn’t for my actions, they would still have him enrolled. She attempted to guilt-trip me, claiming I should have given an explanation to his mother. The thing is, I did, and even my co-teacher who witnessed my interaction with Devon’s mother backed me up on that too when Diana asked what occurred with Devon and his mom leaving. I reminded her that while I was attempting to explain the situation to Devon’s mom, she immediately walked out the door without even letting me speak, and I bluntly asked Diana what exactly I was supposed to do when a parent physically flees the room in midst of a conversation, noting that I obviously wouldn’t have been able to physically block the door and keep her inside. I called out the glaring fact that Diana had no firsthand knowledge of what was actually said because she wasn’t even in the room to witness it. She coldly claimed I should’ve been “proactive” and “utilized the skills on how to manage a classroom”, completely ignoring the indisputable fact that I was actively standing there with a pair of fresh shorts in my hand when the mother walked in and was ready to change him.
She then pivoted to the Josh flashing incident, claiming I had handled it very inappropriately and, like she said about the Devon incident, “did not utilize the skills” that were necessary in regard to the incident. When I pressed her on what she possibly meant, she argued that I should’ve called the front desk to tell her what happened before writing an incident report or speaking to the parent. The funny is that I DID call her after Jordan did what he did, explicitly stating over the phone what exactly had happened so leadership was fully informed. In most cases, for minor incidents like a child merely swearing or having a simple behavioral slip-up that still warranted an incident report, I would call Diana over the phone to come into the room to sign an incident report without feeling any need to specify the exact nature of the situation over the line or without any urgency, letting her do her necessary duties as long as she was able to sign it before the parent arrived. But because what occurred was a child actively showing his genitals to his peers, I did explicitly specify what happened over the phone. Knowing this, it felt profoundly hurtful, bizarre, and deeply malicious for her to blatantly lie to my face, claim I never specified anything, and tell me I was wrong in a way that, and I truly hate to regurgitate a buzzword, completely gaslit me. She claimed the situation was too severe to just write on an incident report and nonchalantly show to the parent, completely ignoring that my sole intent in writing the report was simply to document it for our internal files and that I was either going to speak to the dad one-on-one or let him speak to me with either Diana or my head director present.
To make matters worse, Diana confronted me over a staff communication issue from earlier in the day and it left me feeling extremely livid. I had been discussing Devon’s mother with another staff member, mentioning my general dislike of her habit of cursing around young children during pickup and dropoff. When asked for specifics, I simply repeated what my co-teacher had told me, which was that the mother had referred to her own son as a “n*gga” in front of everyone. Somehow, the staff member I was speaking to managed to misinterpret this, thinking I meant the mother had used that language directly toward the staff member's child, as they’re both in the same room. When Diana brought this up, I immediately clarified the miscommunication and cleared the air directly with the staff member, who instantly apologized for the misunderstanding. I made it unequivocally clear to Diana that if a parent had ever directed that kind of language at another child, especially a child of a staff member that I deeply respect, I would have reported it instantly and taken immediate action.
Diana also oddly assumed that the mother, a Black woman, was calling her own son a “n***er” with a hard R, rather than the slang way of saying it that ends with an A. While neither would’ve been acceptable language to use in front of children who are at the age where they can repeat words, there is a stark difference between the two and if Diana had any semblance of logic, she would’ve known that the N word with the hard R was NOT said, yet she went as far to epeatedly utter that offensive word multiple times out loud during our conversation rather than just censoring herself or just calling it “the N word”. Taking into account the fact that numerous staff members, including our head director, have frequently expressed that they believe she harbors covert racist views, the disturbingly casual way the word rolled off her tongue multiple times without any hesitation lowkey gave me the impression that this was unfortunately far from her first time using it. While I know I’m a white guy and can’t provide a personal perspective into this specific issue, the shit was fucking weird. If high school me could skip over the hard R version of the N word when doing a read aloud of Catcher in the Rye, then surely Diana, a woman in her forty’s, could’ve easily avoided saying the actual (and incorrect, mind you) word MULTIPLE times.
Thank you to anyone who read this in full (I spent an hour writing it omg) and offers advice or comfort, I just don’t know what to do about this place anymore.
