January 21, 2024 at 9:49 pm

Supervisor At Troubled Teen Center Tried To Take Away Christmas Presents, So Employee Goes Around Them To Play Santa

by Matthew Gilligan

Source: Reddit/AITA/@necromancery1

I don’t care how bad a kid behaves, every single one of them deserves to enjoy Christmas…especially in the place where these kids live.

And the person who wrote this story on Reddit was looking out for them, no doubt about it!

Check out how they went the extra mile to help some kids who needed some cheer in their lives.

Oh, so kids with behavior difficulties don’t deserve Christmas?

“I used to work at a place where teenagers lived full time when they had behavior difficulties, usually drug use, alcohol abuse and/or truancy.

They lived there full time, and the program was staffed a full 24hrs.

They required supervision at all times, except for in the bathroom, and at night, supervision was reduced down to 15 minute checks all night long.

I worked third shift at this job and I worked there for, at the time of this incident, five years, almost five and a half.

They weren’t a huge fan of the folks in charge.

I did not love my management, but I did love my kids. And for the entire five and half years I worked there, during the christmas holidays, the 3rd shift staff would do “The Seven Nights of Christmas” wherein, we’d put little presents outside their doors on the week leading up to Christmas.

They were pretty generic things like, body washes, lotions, soft fuzzy blankets, etc. But it made them feel a little better about being stuck in an institution during the holidays.

This place also had… this is hard to explain in text, but they had “statuses” that they could placed on, and for ease of understanding, I’ll call them Bad, Good, Perfect. If someone was on the Perfect Status, they had a later bed time, etc.

Certain unwanted behaviors could knock them from a Perfect Status to a Good one, or a Good one to a Bad one. This place insisted up, down and sideways that the “Bad” status was NOT a punishment, that the kids behaviors had EARNED the Bad status and as soon as they showed remorse and that they’d learned from their mistake, they could Earn back Good status.

This is important.

A new manager showed up.

Well, during the year 2018, we got a new Manager. We’ll call them Sammy.

A few days before the Christmas holiday, Sammy calls me up when I get to work, and says “kids who earned Bad status don’t get their 7 Days of Christmas present until they earn off Bad.”

And I disagreed with that SUPER hard. She insisted it was because were rewarding bad behavior, I insisted that the Bad status wasn’t a punishment and that withholding presents was a punishment, so which is it Sammy, hmm?

They decided that enough was enough.

She got short with me and ended up hanging up on me.

So I wrote out my end of night logs by throwing her under the bus, and stated, openly, on government legal emails, that Ms. Sammy Lastname had stated that the ladies who had earned Bad Status were not allowed to get the 7 Days of Christmas presents that their peers were getting, and as this was a punishment, that we needed to change the legislation on our rule set.

Since Bad status says on its paperwork that it is not a punishment, it’s a consequence earned by behaviors, we should be changing it to say that these behaviors are bad, and they earned a punishment status.

I got several emails in quick succession that stated to give the presents, and then I got written up.

I gave the kids the presents anyway, before the email, because **** that.

Also **** you Sammy, you know who you are.”

And here’s how people reacted on Reddit.

This reader talked about the rules…

Source: Reddit/AITA

Another Reddit user said this manager shouldn’t have been there.

Source: Reddit/AITA

One individual thinks this person is doing the right thing.

Source: Reddit/AITA

Another person talked about their previous job.

Source: Reddit/AITA

And one Reddit user said they are definitely helping a lot of kids.

Source: Reddit/AITA

I’m glad they stepped up.

Nice work!

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.