On July 17, 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan filed a flight plan from Brooklyn to California and landed in Dublin, Ireland twenty-eight hours later. He blamed a faulty compass. Corrigan’s story earned him the nickname “Wrong Way Corrigan” and a permanent place in aviation folklore. A youth-serving organization does not get that kind of forgiveness. When a program…
Debbie Ausburn and Tom Rawlings are leading a free webinar on July 22 that walks youth-serving organizations through building a child protection policy that works in real life, not just one that reads well in a binder. The session runs 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. ET through Early Childhood Investigations Webinars. Register in advance; the webinar…
My June 30 post covered what courts require when organizations supervise staff. This post covers the other half of the supervision picture: what courts require when organizations supervise the children in their programs. The legal standard is less obvious than most administrators assume. Furthermore, a 2024 meta-analysis on overparenting and a growing body of developmental psychology research give YSOs a…
The Founders built something that has lasted 250 years not because they got everything right the first time, but because they encoded principles, designed a system that could evolve, and then did the unglamorous work of making it function. I have spent decades advising and defending youth-serving organizations, and I see the same three failure…
Tom Rawlings and I recorded a six-part podcast series for YSO Academy, and all six episodes are now available. The series is called “Cultivating a Culture of Safety.” If you advise youth-serving organizations, or if you are an administrator working through child protection policy development, this series covers the full process. The six episodes run…
When a church in Delaware retained a pastor who had sexually abused two minor girls at prior churches, a jury found the organization liable after he committed a third assault at the new church. The decision illustrates the central question every youth-serving organization faces: what does adequate staff supervision actually require, and where does falling short become…
Every incident report your organization files is a legal document, not potentially, not only if something goes wrong, but a legal document from the moment someone signs it. After three decades of advising youth-serving organizations through litigation, licensing investigations, and regulatory audits, I have seen more cases turn on the quality of an incident report…
How a youth organization responds to a parent complaint about staff can determine its legal exposure. Here is what the law requires.
Many youth organizations have discovered the hard way that their child protection policies had a critical gap: they addressed what adults must not do to children but said nothing about what happens when one child harms another. That gap is not a minor oversight. Research, shows that more than 70% of child sexual abuse is perpetrated…
We have long known about the replication crisis in social science research — the problem that few findings hold up in later studies. In April 2026, the largest replication project ever attempted found that only about half of the existing research holds up under further testing. This finding has profound implications for youth-serving organizations that want to follow evidence-based practices.