I wonder if any of you reading this would knowingly put your child in a car with some who'd been drinking straight vodka.  Would you let someone in a drunken stupor transport your child ?  That's what happened in my local area, when a bus driver was caught drinking straight vodka out of a water bottle.  He had a blood alcohol level nearly 3 times the legal amount.  "DWI in New York is considered any BAC reading of 0.08 percent or greater."  This bus driver's BAC (Blood Alcohol Level) was .23.

How'd he get caught?  A child aid worker accompanied the children (good thing!), and noticed his inebriated condition, called her superiors, who in turn called the police.  So it was handled, you might say.  But meantime, what was at risk?  Only the lives of the children.  That's all.  And of course, the lives of anyone else driving or walking past that bus that day.

When we put a child on the schoolbus each day, how many people have a part in that child's life before they return home to us in the afternoon?  Are they drunks?  Drug addicts?  Pedophiles?  Psychopaths?  Or are they just plain mean and abusive?  Some children don't take the bus, so they deal with a school crossing guard.  How about the teacher aid?  Who is serving up food in the school cafeteria?  What has the school's custodian been up to?  The gym teacher?  The principal?  the school nurse?  The hall monitor?  The math teacher?  The history teacher?  The science teacher?

Of course, the list could go on and on.  "Not in our school."  "Our town is OK.  Everybody knows everybody."  "We live in the Bible belt."  It does not matter.  It's everywhere and anywhere.  And as time goes on it gets worse and worse.  And this says nothing of the other students our children will brush up against every day in our public school system.  Private schools as well.

“But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.”  2 Timothy 3:1-5

"Avoid such men [and women] as these."  How else to help our children "avoid such men as these" than to keep them home where they belong?  No doubt, for every person listed above who is in our school systems, there are more who are good.  Many teachers, administrators, janitors, school nurses, etc., are wonderful people.  They are in a sick and broken system, but they are good.  It is the many who are not so good - who seek either to do your child harm, or be so self-indulgent (like the bus driver at the beginning of this post) that they put your child in harm's way.  It's that one (or two or three) people in the system who could do your child damage for the rest of his life.

Let's bring/keep our children home.  Let's give them a safe and loving environment to learn in.  There are too many people and situations out there that seriously need to be avoided.

Deb Turner

- Home Where They Belong