No Child Left Behind The Fence

I work for a daycare program hosted by the local community center, serving kids from three to twelve years old after school and during summer break. The community center has a fenced-in playground and field for outside play when the weather is nice. The play area is on the corner of the lot, bordering two streets that don’t usually have a lot of traffic.

I was with the older kids outside one day, and saw an SUV pull up on the other side of our fence and park along the curb. Since this is the USA, this immediately triggers a mental alarm bell for me, and I start mentally preparing to herd the kids inside in case anything happens.

Instead of the worst-case scenario we all fear, I see a mother and two boys, roughly eight and eleven years old, get out of the car. I don’t recognize the two boys, so they are obviously not on our roster. The mother starts encouraging the boys to jump the fence, so I call out to her and start walking over.

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am, boys, please stay outside the fence!”

To their credit, the boys freeze, but the mother starts screaming.

Mother: “They just want to have fun on the playground!”

Me: “I understand, but this is not a public playground. This is [Community Center] private property, and this is a private daycare group.”

Mother: “Oh, just let them play! I have errands to run, and I can’t take them with me.”

Me: “I cannot allow that, ma’am. If you want to register them for the daycare program, you can go around the building and speak with the women at the front desk, but I cannot allow the boys to join us today.”

The mother starts walking back around to the driver’s door of her car.

Mother: “Too bad, they’re here now! I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Me: “MA’AM, if you leave your children here, I will call the police for child abandonment.”

The mother holds her hands over her ears and sings out “LA-LA-LA-LA!” like a petulant toddler, before showing me both middle fingers, getting into her car, and driving off down the street.

After processing everything, I tell the boys to follow me through the gate and around to the front desk of the community center. At the front desk, I report what happened and ask one of the receptionists to go outside and help with the daycare group so that I can tell the police exactly what happened.

Throughout the entire situation, the boys didn’t react at all, as if they were used to this happening. The police arrived, I gave them my statement, and the officers took the boys with them to the police station.

A few months later, I received a summons to attend court. Apparently, the woman (a single mother) had multiple charges of child abandonment on her record and was finally facing a criminal trial. 

I testified as a witness, along with others who had dealt with her sons after she abandoned them. She tried everything in court, sobbing about how much she loved her sons, raging at me and the other witnesses for “being mean and not helping a struggling single mother”, and anything else she could think of, but was found guilty on all charges and given the maximum prison sentence for child abandonment in our state.

She lost custody of her sons. Unfortunately, they were put into the state foster care system, so I have no clue where they are now, but I hope they’re doing better without their mother.