Popular Teen Center Volunteer Asked to Resign, Seeks Reinstatement

For the past year, Dixon resident LC Cunningham has spent countless hours of his free time volunteering at the .

Through the teen center, Cunningham came to know most of the teenagers who visited the center on any given weekend. Some of those teens came to know and like Cunningham so much that they sent him friend requests on the popular social networking site Facebook.

But by accepting some of the teens’ friend requests, on his own personal Facebook page, Cunningham ran into a snag. The teen center prohibits its volunteers from using their personal Facebook accounts to communicate with the teenagers.

When Cunningham told the board, during a recent meeting at the teen center, that he was commenting on their web posts, accepting friend requests and being their virtual friends, the center’s governing board requested Cunningham to resign from his volunteer post.

The board’s decision has shocked and saddened Cunningham, teens and their parents alike.

"All I've ever wanted to do is be an example of a good man to the kids of Dixon, and 99 percent of the time I was pretty successful and the kids were responding,” Cunningham said. “However, I also showed them that people goof up and there are consequences when they do.  And now, I will show them how to gracefully accept the decisions of superiors, while continuing to fight for what you think is right. I will continue to fight to be reinstated at the teen center. There is a lot of good happening there and I need to be a part of it."

Cunningham said he used his Facebook account as a father would use it to monitor what his children are doing on the popular social networking site. He himself is a father of four children.

“Mostly, I just used it for getting information out,” he said. “The people that made this decision don’t know how Facebook works. I was absolutely getting bombarded from kids with friend requests. I accepted it. I thought ‘I’ll just use this as a way to get information out. I’ll just use it as long as I keep it honorable and above reproach who’s going to have a problem with that?’ You know?”

But the Teen Center’s governing board saw it differently.

“There’s a reason that we don’t want people independently (using social networking to communicate with children),” said Jon Cox, who sits on the board and is the and interim city manager. “It doesn’t have the ability to have an oversight by somebody else. One-on-one contact (with the teens) is something that we tell all of our volunteers to make sure that they are with another adult.”

The decision to ask Cunningham to step down was not easy for the board to do, especially for Chief Cox who is friends with Cunningham.

“I think it was good intent,” Cox said, describing Cunningham’s motivation for using Facebook to communicate with teens. “But it was something that the policy was there for a purpose.”

The Teen Center is not the only youth organization that has policies against its staff using Facebook to communicate with youths. For example, the Boy Scouts of America have a similar policy that prohibits the its members from using their private social networking accounts to communicate with adolescents.

“Staying true to the commitment of the BSA to be an advocate for youth and to keep children and their privacy safe, both online and off, should always be at the forefront of any considerations where social media usage is concerned,” the Boy Scouts policy reads. “To help ensure that all communication on social media channels remains positive and safe, these channels must be public, and all communication on or through them must be public. This enables administrators to monitor all communication and help ensure there is no inappropriate communication between adult leaders and Scouts or between Scouts themselves. Therefore, no private channels (e.g., private Facebook groups or invite-only YouTube channels) are acceptable in helping to administer the Scouting program.”

The Dixon Teen Center’s Volunteer Staff Policy simply states: “Do not plan activities or make contact with teens outside of the Teen Center without the approval of the parent and the governing authority of the Teen Center.”

To get information out to the youths and the community, the Teen Center staff operates a public Facebook page. All volunteers know of this Facebook page and the center's policy, so why did Cunningham violate it?

Speaking their language

"When I grew up everybody was in charge of watching everyone else’s kids, I grew up in the Midwest,” Cunningham said.

If Cunningham was caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to be doing he said “They would probably say something to my mom before I got home.”

Of course, this was before the rise of social media that makes the sharing of news with anyone at any time as easy as clicking a mouse button.  

Cunningham said he knew that his actions were against the Teen Center’s policies, but he justified it to himself because it was a good way to find out what was really happening in the teenagers' lives.

“I started after I got all these Facebook friends (and) I started reading their traffic,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham would see some of his youthful Facebook friends cursing on their profile pages, expressing interest in fighting other teens and talk about bullying.

By being their friend on Facebook, Cunningham would help prevent fights from happening, straighten out inappropriate behavior such as cursing and answer all the questions that teenagers had grown comfortable asking him about the Teen Center.

How practical is having a rule that prevents volunteers from communicating with teens outside of the center in a town as small as Dixon, where people tend to run into one another everywhere they go?

Cox said that the governing board does not discourage volunteers to go out of their way to avoid teens outside of the center.

“The intent of the policy is to have transparency, in the sense of contact that happens between volunteers and our teens,” Cox said. “If it’s something that happens by happenstance, that’s one thing.”

But to communicate with them on social networking is another, since the governing board and parents don’t have a way to monitor those interactions.

Cunningham is a longtime Dixonite who through the years has been involved in numerous youth activities in Dixon, he said. Cunningham said it was he who first told Chief Cox that the community could benefit from having a teen center in town and was instrumental in making the idea into reality.

“I have been very involved with this community, I simply know a lot of kids,” he said.  “I've had hundreds of kids in my van headed to away football or rugby games, I've had dozens of different kids sleeping over at my house and eating out of my fridge throughout the years. I have ran large youth groups in this town with many city-wide events ranging from 80 to 120 kids at a time. When my kids were little, I was laid off for an extended period and I spent the majority of the school year at Tremont Elementary school volunteering in my kid's classrooms, playing soccer with them at recess and helping out during lunch.”

Children at the Teen Center were bummed to hear about Cunningham’s departure, Cunningham said. So was the board, Cox said. Some parents have taken up a petition to have Cunningham reinstated as a volunteer. Cox said the board has no current plans to consider bringing Cunningham back.

Cunningham has said still wants to be involved in some way with the teen center, and is actively seeking reinstatement.

“I’m sad and I’m ashamed that I put everybody in this position but like I said, nothing I did was malicious or inappropriate,” Cunningham said. “But like I said, I broke the rule.”

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