Checklist for Safety Checks in Your Facility
How is Your Facility Designed to Keep Children Safe? Child development and school-age programs operate in many different types of facilities….
Home / Safe Environments / Safe Environment Strategies: Transportation
Your youth-serving organization may provide transportation to children and youth—either on a regular or occasional basis. If you’re a larger organization, you may employ professional transportation companies to transport your students or clients on a daily basis. Or you may purchase your own vehicle(s) and hire one or more drivers. Alternatively, depending on your size or the nature of your services, you may rely on supervisors, employees, volunteers, or parents to transport children and youth in their personal vehicles. Each of these situations carries the potential for inappropriate contact with the children/youth being transported. Although larger organizations such as public schools are subject to regulatory requirements for the screening and hiring of drivers, many others are not.
Children and youth are and have been vulnerable to sexual maltreatment while being transported as part of an organization’s program. Drivers are also susceptible to false allegations when alone with a child being transported. For these reasons, you’ll need to consider your transportation policies. If your organization provides transportation under any circumstances, you should define in your policies who is responsible for transporting youth to and from regular activities and special events. The opportunities for drivers to be alone in a vehicle with a child/youth who is not their own should be minimized.
Some questions to consider as you define your transportation policies:
Safe Kids Thrive recommends the following best practices when it comes to transporting children/youth:
Safe Environments
How is Your Facility Designed to Keep Children Safe? Child development and school-age programs operate in many different types of facilities….
Sustainability
Community interaction and involvement is important in maintaining a culture of safety surrounding your Youth-Serving Organization (YSO). In order to…
Code of Conduct
Your Code of Ethics helps to guide the behavior and decision-making of your staff, volunteers, and participants by clarifying the standards and…
Reporting
Staff and volunteers at the YSO (Youth-Serving Organization) should be proficient in discussing abuse and responding to disclosures of abuse. YSO…
Training
The approaches in the chart below can provide frameworks that make your organization most effective when training adults and/or children/youth….
Reporting
Recognizing Abuse & Neglect The minimum required safety elements for you to prepare leadership, staff, and volunteers to recognize, respond…
Sustainability
Why Collect Data? “Mathematics” and “measurement” are words that send many of us scurrying for cover, but in the world of organizational…
Reporting
Effective reporting structures rely on staff and volunteers’ recognition of signs and symptoms of abuse and neglect. The Youth-Serving…
Training
Parents and other caregivers need to receive, at a minimum, the same level of prevention education as their child/youth. Parents can be strong…
Safe Environments
Standards should be implemented to ensure safe physical spaces for children, such as clear sight–lines and visitor procedures. To ensure child…
Customized child sexual abuse prevention guidelines to meet the unique needs of any organization that serves children.
Learning Center Registration
Sign up for an account and start your learning experience.
Free Online Assessment
Let us help you find out where to start.