How do I volunteer?

Originally posted by dorothyrde Actually it is more and more being required that background checks be done on people who are working with children. Our religious ed teachers at church are volunteers, but they have to go through a class and have a background check done before they can teach. I am sure USA swimming does not have this yet, but the time may come where they will have to. At the YMCA, employees who work with children go through child abuse prevention classes, and also have background checks. It is required now when taking a job working with children. Again, this is a paid position, but the time is coming that it will be required of volunteers also. I've been involved with this problem for more than a quarter of a century, and have been writing about it for more than a decade. I have, for a long time, advocated criminal background checks for all workers who have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children. It's irrelevant whether they're paid or volunteers. What matters is the degree of contact they have with children. My point was that officials at a swim meet typically aren't going to have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children, and therefore it may be overkill to do a criminal background check on them. But that's something for USA Swimming to decide. (Swimming coaches, of course, are a different matter, because they are going to have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children.) At the same time, having "child abuse prevention classes" for people who work with children strikes me as a bit silly. My company has a very clearly defined policy on working with children, and it's laid out in plain English. You don't need a class - all you need to do is read it. And that doesn't take very long. It's not rocket science! What are needed are classes for children on how to stay safe, and for parents on how to keep their children safe, and organizations that are genuinely concerned about children would make better use of their time if they spent it running classes like that, in my opinion. You'll find, by the way, that the organizations that have taken the most extreme actions "to protect children from abuse" (so extreme that, in some cases, they literally endanger kids in other ways) are nearly always the organizations that ignored the problem for an inexcusably long time. It is hard to escape the impression that their extreme stances today are a reaction to the public outrage over their previous inaction rather than an intelligent, well-thought-out response to the problem.

Originally posted by dorothyrde Actually it is more and more being required that background checks be done on people who are working with children. Our religious ed teachers at church are volunteers, but they have to go through a class and have a background check done before they can teach. I am sure USA swimming does not have this yet, but the time may come where they will have to. At the YMCA, employees who work with children go through child abuse prevention classes, and also have background checks. It is required now when taking a job working with children. Again, this is a paid position, but the time is coming that it will be required of volunteers also. I've been involved with this problem for more than a quarter of a century, and have been writing about it for more than a decade. I have, for a long time, advocated criminal background checks for all workers who have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children. It's irrelevant whether they're paid or volunteers. What matters is the degree of contact they have with children. My point was that officials at a swim meet typically aren't going to have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children, and therefore it may be overkill to do a criminal background check on them. But that's something for USA Swimming to decide. (Swimming coaches, of course, are a different matter, because they are going to have prolonged and/or unsupervised contact with children.) At the same time, having "child abuse prevention classes" for people who work with children strikes me as a bit silly. My company has a very clearly defined policy on working with children, and it's laid out in plain English. You don't need a class - all you need to do is read it. And that doesn't take very long. It's not rocket science! What are needed are classes for children on how to stay safe, and for parents on how to keep their children safe, and organizations that are genuinely concerned about children would make better use of their time if they spent it running classes like that, in my opinion. You'll find, by the way, that the organizations that have taken the most extreme actions "to protect children from abuse" (so extreme that, in some cases, they literally endanger kids in other ways) are nearly always the organizations that ignored the problem for an inexcusably long time. It is hard to escape the impression that their extreme stances today are a reaction to the public outrage over their previous inaction rather than an intelligent, well-thought-out response to the problem.