Has anyone else heard of this?
http://www.fathers.com/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=60It's an organization where either the school board, or principal of a middle school asks fathers (or father figures) to volunteer their time, at least one full day, to basically be a watch dog at school; mingle with the kids as they transfer between classes, monitor the schools perimeter, be a sentry of sorts.
The guy that started this was prompted by one of the many recent school shootings. The particular shooting that stirred the founder of this organization was one where a 13 and an 11 year old opened fire with rifles at school
http://www.cnn.com/US/9803/24/school.shooting/index.html While events like this are tragic, I do not believe this type of organization will repel these types of attacks...which I assume is the main purpose of this organization.
My experience with this is as follows: My 10 year old step-daughter comes home on Monday and asks if I want to attend this father/kid event at her school tomorrow night "sure" I say "What is it?" Well, this particular 10 year old keeps a fairly scattered itinerary, to say the least; she really didn't know and the permission slip/RSVP slip she was supposed to bring home was mysteriously missing...
I show up, wanting to support my step kids as much as I can, thinking this was some sort of fund raiser, or the like, wrong.
I knew before I got there that there would be pizza and door prizes, but I understand why now. They were expecting around 50 dads to show up, closer to 150 showed up. I believe most of the other dads there were in the same boat as I was, nobody really knew what they were getting into, but once everyone was seated, filling out paperwork and eating pizza, the video began.
After some news clips from various local news casts about what watch D.O.G.S. was about, then the founder began his spiel on why his program was a good thing.
The catalyst for this program was 2 prepubescents without enough moral underpinnings to realize that gunning down classmates and teachers was WRONG. I have nothing against acting when action is needed, but the first thing that went through my mind after hearing all of this was "a rifle will put down a dad just as easily as anyone else" and "this will not sway a determined, angry, confused kid from marching into the 'gun free' zone and killing as many people as he can".
Now, me being a gunny, the first thing I would recommend would be to either arm the teachers, or arm the dads! Best case scenario, the way they have it now: the dad sees the kid running up to school with a rifle and a backpack full of ammo and calls the cops a minute earlier than the bleeding teacher OR the dad somehow manages to miss getting shot and somehow disarms the kid.
I will be involved with my kids as much as I can, but they baited those dads in there with the pizza and the door prizes and guilted them into volunteering with the recording of the founder giving a speech about how the man in the crows nest on the Titanic didn't have binoculars and if he did, blah blah... Has anything in history like this ever been done? Has the man of the house ever been asked to shirk his bread winning duties to volunteer to do a job he's already paying someone else to do? (side rant--Why do we have to pay for ALL of the kids school supplies? don't our taxes already do that?) I hate it when a trend rolls around, you see the flaws and don't participate, others give you that "well, don't you care about the children?" look, trend ends, no one apologizes for any guilt trips they may have dolled out....*sigh*
Until our culture takes some huge steps in the right direction, no amount of monitoring, or rules, or happy feely programs will stop these horrendously tragic school shootings; even then, we're still human. Perspective starts at home. The correct perspective needs truth. Truth is Christ. :D
