Today in the office we had a meeting about next summer. I just can’t get my head around how quickly the seasons come and go the older I get. In about 6 weeks I will be receiving about 20 resumes a day and until March I actually read (albeit very quickly) all of them and make any notes on the file so when I am picking the kids I want to interview I pay attention. By the time we open I have usually received about 2000 resumes and eventually stop reading them around the middle of March.
Hiring 150+ new staff for every season has advantages and disadvantages. It is great when I manage to hire a great group the previous season and a lot want to come back (for the record 2010 was a great staff year), it means I don’t have to interview as many newbies. There are seasons however, when I have a lot of turnover and the group as a whole isn’t fantastic or some of the staff have started to take working at Cleves for granted and I have to ‘clean house’ in a bunch of departments when hiring for the next year. There isn’t a formula for hiring a great bunch, it is mostly luck. Honestly if they all get along and have a ton of fun together, I have a good year - simple.
My least favourite part of the job is firing people. I hate doing it but somebody has to when it is necessary. My Dad always told me that firing at least one person at the beginning of the season sets a good example for the rest of the summer and I guess he is right but it doesn’t make it any easier.....unless the person I just fired pulled a major boneheaded move, like one kid did in the summer of 2003.
The job description of a children’s counselor starts with the following sentence, ‘The primary responsibility of a children’s counselor is to provide a safe and fun environment for children ranging in age from newborn to teen.....’. After this following incident I actually read this sentence over to see if there was a grey area there and I should change the wording, nope.
We have made a lot of great additions to our kids’ facilities since 1996. One of the things we built was what we call ‘The Colour Cube’. It is a covered play structure that is like the ones you see in some fast food restaurants and it has been an amazing addition, especially on rainy days. Sometimes when counselors don’t have any kids come back to their group after lunch they are given odd jobs to do. One day in the summer of 2003 one of the counselors had the job of replacing the huge ‘zip ties’ on the foam posts of that structure. There was a group of kids in the ‘Colour Cube’ one afternoon playing ‘Cops and Robbers’ and this SECOND YEAR counselor thought it would be funny to tie one of these ‘zip ties’ around one of the kids’ necks. Of course the kid panicked and pulled the end, which made it tighter, started to choke him and the other counselors had to quickly cut it off with scissors. The Director of my kids program at the time (who did that job for several years and was amazing at it) hauled him into her office to give him shit. He couldn’t understand what the big deal was and thought she was over reacting. She called me, told me what happened and we decided to let him sleep on it. If he came in the next day and apologized and was remorseful we would just put him on probation, if he still didn’t see her point of view, we would let him go. Right after the counselors’ morning meeting the next day she called me and told me he was actually pissed off and thought she totally freaked out for no reason. My immediate response was ‘He’s gone, would you like me to do it or would you like to’. Her response was, ‘I’d be happy to do it’.
I sat in my office waiting for the parent call that I knew was coming (those are a subject for an entire posting at a later date). What I didn’t know was that this kid’s family had a cottage pretty close to Cleves so about an hour later the dad and the kid come into my office for ‘the talk’. The dad introduced himself to me and said that he felt his son had been unfairly treated and that he thought I should have given him a second chance. I have a rule that I have always abided by and it might not be the right way to handle things but I will never do it any other way, I NEVER go over my manager’s heads. If they make a decision and want to handle things a certain way, unless I know something else about the story that will change their minds, I will NOT go against what they say. I called the Director, told her the pair were in my office and asked her to come over. The three of us sat in my office for several minutes not saying a word, and waited for her. When she came in I had her sit behind my desk and I sat on the far side of the office and just listened. She was a pro, didn’t waiver, was confident in her decision and said that there was absolutely no way she was going to give him a second chance because he still didn’t get what he did wrong. The Dad then turns to me and tells me he wants me to go over her head and keep him, which I said I would absolutely NOT do. To say that didn’t go over well would be a major understatement!!!
Until that point I don’t think I had said a word. He was getting really pissed off and told me he was a Vice Principal and that he had to give students second chances all of the time. Me saying to him ‘OK you are a Vice Principal, if one of your teachers had done this to a student what would you have done’ PUT HIM OVER THE EDGE. (By the way it is important to note that he might have been 5’7”, I am 5’9”, thank God) We are now all standing because I want them out of there and he gets right in my face and starts screaming at me and I actually thought he was going to take a swing at me, he was that pissed off (for the record I wanted him to, I could have taken him!!). I stepped back, reached for the door and said ‘This meeting is over’ and I followed that with ‘and you have until 5:00 pm to have your kid off the property’. RAGE! He started to leave my office and screams the whole way down the hall ‘YOUR FAMILY SUCKS AND YOU DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR STAFF.....’. I obviously wasn’t going to dignify that with a response. The Director and I went back into my office, she sat back behind my desk, and I sat across the room from her. There was silence for at least 2 minutes until I said ‘I don’t know about you but I thought that went VERY well!!!’ HYSTERICAL LAUGHTER, meeting adjourned.
