doubleplusundead

July 24, 2008

Normally, A Story About A Young Lad Wandering Into A Hooters Would Be Awesome

But not this time.

It appears as though a five-year-old in Dallas snuck out of his day care and crossed I-35E (which I have been told is an extremely busy stretch of Interstate) and wound up in a Hooters Parking Lot.

Employees of Hooters found the child safe about 5:20 p.m. He left the child care center in the 2300 block of San Jacinto Boulevard, crossed the Interstate 35E northbound service road and Dallas Drive, bought a soft drink at a service station and walked to Hooters, where an employee found him in the parking lot and called police.

Deborah Pugh, who owns the child care business, said Wednesday that the boy asked to go to the bathroom and then slipped out a fire exit door, which must, by law, remain unlocked.

“It was just really fast,” Pugh said. “When the parent came for him we said he was in the bathroom. But we looked and realized he wasn’t, and we called police.”

And yet this daycare center is still allowed to operate.

Posted by: eddiebear at 09:57 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 187 words, total size 1 kb.

1 It takes a hell of a lot to get a daycare closed down. I showed up early to pick up my son from an in-home daycare, back when he was about six months old. The daycare owner didn't want to wake him up from his nap when they arrived back at her house after an outing, so she left him in her minivan. He was completely drenched in sweat when I showed up. I shudder to think how many times that had happened in the couple of months he was there, before I found out how...there's no word for what she was. I had a hell of a time finding a sitter after that, too, because she was the head of the county home daycare association. And she's still running a daycare, with a license to care for more than the usual allotment of kids.

His next sitter talked smack about parents behind their backs, in front of their kids. And wasn't attentive enough to what was going on in her own home to notice that her daughter was turning into a drunken slut who was flunking out of high school, until her daughter was far enough gone that she went from being an A and high B student to not being able to get into any private college because her grades were so bad.

Most daycare owners will pretend that it's all about the kids, but many of them are in the business for the same reason many teachers are in the business - they think they know how to raise your kids better than you do, and there's even less accountability and less education required to be a daycare owner than there is to be a teacher. There are exceptions - the pre-K my son attended was fantastic. But I'm really glad we were able to get our finances straight enough for me to stay home with the kids while my son was still young.

Posted by: Alice H at July 25, 2008 08:58 AM (jRtPb)

2 I am fortunate that my wife's sister has a child almost the same age as my daughter, and has been able to watch her when we needed assistance.

Posted by: eddiebear at July 25, 2008 04:00 PM (9u8cm)

Hide Comments | Add Comment