Hi Sue,

At Rochester, NY Thanksgiving Festival, we tried this year to have a "Family 
Friendly" line.
It wound up being hard to keep that line going, because the beginners tended 
to join it as well,
so without enough experienced dancers, it tended to fall behind the rest of 
the hall. The caller
did a Great Job of keeping an eye on the trouble brewing and kept the line 
together, though.

Next year, we'll try making it a "Kid Friendly" line, and try to steer 
beginners to more experienced
partners. 

The issue was identified by several comments on the survey from the prior 
year, and the organizing
committee decided that we wanted to remain inclusive, and safe for the kids, 
while not degrading the experience of people who paid for a weekend of dancing 
of the quality they have come to expect from that event. We explained to 
people with kids, as they came in, that it was for safety. It was well received by 
everyone we spoke to.

In a message dated 1/17/09 12:00:23 PM, callers-request at sharedweight.net 
writes:


> Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:38:42 -0500
> From: Sue Robishaw <sue at manytracks.com>
> Subject: [Callers] Young Children at Dance
> To: CallersList <callers at sharedweight.net>
> Message-ID: <49720992.8050309 at manytracks.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
> 
>    Hi,
>        How have you handled parents bringing their too young children into
>    a dance insisting "they can do the dance" when they are too small/young
>    to participate in any meaningful way, and generally are just confused,
>    clog up the dance and prevent the others from dancing (and the
>    youngster from having any fun either)? This is probably not a problem
>    at your usual contra dance, but at "family dance" events (longways and
>    such).
>           Cheers,
>           Sue R.
> 
>    --
> 




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