8.      Be trustworthy – Students are terrible at keeping secrets, and they want to tell other people what’s going on at school or home sooooooo badly!  I discuss the ramifications of being a “Mandated Reporter” in another section of this website, but 99% of the time students will come to you with news that you don’t legally have to report to anyone:  news of who was smoking in the restroom, who is going to fight by the bike rack after school, or who threw a pop bottle out the window of Bus #12.  When I was a teacher, students knew that I would never reveal where I got my news.  As a result, I had an underground “Rat Squad” that told me everything that was going on at school.  The administrators (who just didn’t get it) would come to ME to get their info.  One thing they did understand was that the info. was more important than knowing where it came from.  The students all knew that I knew everything that was going on, and that gave me a sort of “street cred” that earned me a lot of respect from the students.  Are we still using the term street cred?  No?  O.K., sorry.  One thing to remember is that the day that the students find out that you revealed a source is the day that your information pipeline runs dry.  One case in point:  A student went to the Assistant Principal one day to tell him that he saw a student light a toilet paper roll on fire in the bathroom.  The Assistant Principal brought the accused into his office with the accuser to “straighten things out” because he wanted to get both stories at the same time to find out who was lying.  The perpetrator was found guilty, and punished…but at what cost?  The student who “snitched” received a beating that afternoon, the parents of the student who received a beating were mad at the administration for exposing their son (who was just trying to be a good citizen like his parents taught him), the Assistant Principal rarely received “tips” like that again, and spent the rest of his time at the school complaining about the “culture of silence” that made his job so much harder.  That’s what I would call a lose-lose-lose situation…all caused by an administrator who doesn’t know what he is doing.

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