A Tough Situation
June 23rd, 2008 by MarkLast week, I encountered a dilemma of the sort that I’m really not qualified to deal with… and yet I had to. A new virus has been all over the news in Taiwan. To me, it doesn’t seem like much more than a particularly nasty flu, but a few children have already died from it. Some of the more excitable newscasters have even compared it with SARS. While I fully understand the need to effectively quarantine outbreaks, I felt that the media and the populace at large panicked to an undue degree during the SARS outbreak a few years ago.
One of my students’ schools closed her classes down for 10 days. She wasn’t sick herself; it was a precautionary measure. I hadn’t even been aware of this fact, until some of my other students’ parents started suggesting that we not let her come to my classes for a week and a half. I thought this was ridiculous. If they felt the risk was that high, they could keep their own kids at home. Barring any occurrence of conclusive symptoms in her, or a fever at the very least, it seemed unfair to bar her from my class.
Without my knowledge, the secretary called her parents and said something to the effect that all the parents would need to meet before the next class and decide what to do with her. Her parents mistook that to mean that we didn’t want her there, and decided to pull her completely. They were wounded at the idea that everyone thought of their daughter as a “disease carrier” or something to that effect. The speed at which these events happened was pretty shocking. Others seemed likely to pull their own kids if she weren’t kept out of the class. Virtually as soon as I knew anything was wrong at all, parents were taking sides and passions were flaring.
What a mess. In the end, a great deal of talking and smoothing of ruffled feathers (along with a drop in media coverage of this flu) smoothed everything out. We really should have a standard set of procedures to deal with this sort of problem.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 8:14 am
[...] Doubting to shuo on the difficulties of dealing with virus outbreaks. [...]
June 23rd, 2008 at 8:11 pm
In my experience, procedures are very difficult to manage, but very important. If the company ever becomes big enough to be ISO 9000-compliant, then pretty much everything needs to be written down in some procedure. Then you’ve got revision control issues, procedure change procedures (meta-procedures), etc.
In this case, I’m not even sure what the procedure would be: preemptively pull certain students, stop class altogether, or let the parents decide.
Bruce Schneier (renowned security guru) talks extensively about fear and perception of fear in this book “Beyond Fear“. I picked up a copy at the RSA Conference last year (and got it signed). The basic thesis of the book is that people are very bad at estimating risk — they tend to underestimate risks that they control (e.g., driving a car), and overestimates risks they don’t control (e.g., riding in a commercial airline). Similarly, parents can’t control a disease much, so they overestimate the risk.
I really don’t know what the right procedure is the next time a similar incident occurs, but I think the most important thing is the perception of risk instead of the actual risk (since the over-reacting parents are the ones paying), and the important response is one that addresses a perceived risk, even if nothing real was done — what Schneier calls “Security Theater”.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Sounds like you may have several issues to address: 1) Ensuring everyone knows his/her job description and what his/her specific scope of responsibility includes and (in this case) what it doesn’t, and 2) how to address this type of issue in the future.
1) From what you stated, your admin did a terrible job of handling this situation. You may want to find out if someone (mgmt) instructed him/her to call the parents or if it was a unilateral decision (based on parents’ recommendations or otherwise). If the management staff advised the admin to address the parents, then internal procedures for communication and “issue escalation” may be where you need to focus. If not, then ensure everyone knows his/her scope of responsibility and how to escalate issues that fall outside of that scope.
2) A rather simple and objective option for this is to develop a procedure that addresses what to do if anyone has a fever during one of these media blitzes. When faced with this type of situation again, the mgmt committee (or specific named position) would implement a process where everyone’s temperature is taken (students, admins, teachers, managers). Anyone with a fever over “X degrees” goes home; period. One can use the readily available temperature scanners (for example from Amazon.com for about $50US) for high speed, non-contact temperature readings. This is a “visible” process (to parents) and it is objective (doesn’t single out any one person). It addresses real issues (student and staff illnesses) and woul most likely have addressed the parents’ concerns in this case.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:44 pm
We require any student with a cough to wear a mask (they can purchase one from us if they don’t have one). If they have a fever, they have to go home - we have a scanner that does the trick nicely.
You also need to rake your secretary over the coals. She should not be empowered to make unilateral decisions like that, and she should know that.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:40 am
Maoman, I appreciate the comments. We would have sent kids with fevers home this week, for sure. As a rule, though, we don’t check kids’ temperatures.
June 24th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Steve, we’re nowhere that big. I teach most of the students myself and there are no management staff or escalation procedures.
There are certainly all kinds of procedures that would come in helpful under certain circumstances, but we haven’t had the time or resources to worry about much more than our core business concerns of finding students, teaching them as well as we can, and dealing with their parents. The next time this particular problem comes up, we’ll have a clear procedure. That still won’t necessarily help much if we get hit by some other low-probability event, such as a severe earthquake.
June 25th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Matt Ball, interesting mentioning of ISO 9000. When the company where I worked was small, everybody was motivated and enthusiastic. Then it grew up several times and management started to introduce all these ISO 9000 and other “management quality systems” but because of increased bureaucracy the motivation and performance of employees went down considerably.
I am wondering whether Google Company, for example, has ISO 9000 or CMM certification.