House of Eratosthenes

A 5-year-old boy slipped out of the Imagination Station child care center unnoticed Tuesday afternoon, crossed two busy streets and wandered to a restaurant on the Interstate 35E service road in 100-degree heat.

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.

I’m glad he’s not my kid. Because then it would fall to me to explain to him why that was an awful, terrible thing to do, and that he should never think of doing it again. Meanwhile, I’m thinking…hot summer day, five in the afternoon, Hooter’s right across the street…yeah, sure I wouldn’t do exactly the same thing. Sure I wouldn’t.

Now if there are more details coming out, like for example the lad went to Hooter’s first, and then doubled back to the service station after he ordered a pitcher of brew and got turned down…that would be even better.

The story, unfortunately, has a sad-creepy aspect to it as well:

State records show that in April, Imagination Station was cited for violation of Section 746.1230(4) of the Child Care Standards and Regulations — Responsibilities of caregivers — supervision of children.

“It was determined that staff were not supervising properly. Two children were found involved in inappropriate contact while the caregivers were engaged in activities with other groups of children,” according to the citation posted on the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services Web site.

Hope that turns out to be a witch hunt…but it probably won’t.

If the supervision was indeed substandard, that makes it all the tougher to dish out some lecturing in the kid’s direction. I think he’s gonna turn out alright. Of course, this is exactly the kind of kid who ends up diagnosed with whatever-it-iz and medicated…but let’s review here. The daycare center is basically warehousing the kids, and he’s goin’ “Hey look, there’s a Hooters across the street. Screw this.” And forms a plan & acts on it.

And, if shenanigans & hijinks are indeed going on at the daycare, who knows when someone would’ve found out about it had the boy not gone off on his road trip in search of wings & suds. So, once again…politically incorrect behavior…positive result. There’s a lesson here for all of us.

Let me guess, the “inappropriate touching” involved genitalia. A pair of four year olds and naughty bits I’ll bet. This is a calamity?

And why aren’t the authorities going after that convenience store clerk? Are five year olds on the loose that common an event?
- mythusmage | 07/28/2008 @ 07:01
I’m going to react differently to this story if “crossed two busy streets” means something like crossing six lanes on I-5, compared to crossing two on something like I-99. Therefore, I decided to pin it down.

The only Hooters near the “2300 block of San Jacinto Blvd” is on 1980 S Stemmons Fwy, Lewisville, and it is indeed on I-35E. There’s no “Dallas Dr.” nearby and the busy street you would have to cross is route 121. It’s a whole mile of wandering around, so if this is indeed the area and I was jotting down a paragraph for a shocking lead-in, I would have worded it differently. Like, I would have said something about “walked an entire mile.” I think I’m probably looking at the right place but the address-to-map-coordinates translation in Google is operating a little skewed…which has happened to me a few times when I’m really trying to figure out where I’m supposed to be, out on the road.

We’ll never get enough facts to make a strong, reliable interpretation of this “inappropriate touching” thing. The thing people forget about CPS is that it’s full of humans, who can and do embark on witch hunts against desired targets, and much more often they are operating as well-intentioned agents working for other folks not so well-intentioned, who have sent them to harass desired targets. I dunno. It seems a given that the kids could benefit from better supervision. I’d have to guess the authorities were looking for an incident they could use, waited for it to pop up, and it popped up. I really don’t want to be any one of the adults involved in this, that’s for sure.
- mkfreeberg | 07/28/2008 @ 10:05

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Restoring My Hope in the Next GenerationMonday, July 28th, 2008

Restoring My Hope in the Next Generation
Monday, July 28th, 2008