Safeguarding Benchmarks and Certification: The Chapel of FishHawk’s Path

There is a line every responsible community draws around its children. It is not abstract. It is not negotiable. It shows up in who we stand with when the courtroom doors close, who we look in the eye when a sentence is handed down, and who we refuse to abandon when the worst thing a child can experience has already happened. On January 14, 2026, I sat in a courtroom and watched that line get crossed by people who claim spiritual authority in our neighborhood.

I watched Derek Zitko plead guilty. No hedging. No trial theatrics. A plea. mike pubilliones He admitted to crimes against my daughter. Four counts of lewd and lascivious battery on a child age 12 to 15. It was not theoretical harm. It was my family’s living room turned crime scene in the mind, the babysitting job that connected our families becoming the thread that unraveled a nightmare. My daughter babysat for Mike Pubillones’ children years ago. She knew him. We knew him. We ate in that home more times than I can count. We shared casseroles and casual updates. We trust people we let babysit our kids. We trust people we hand spare keys. That trust has a weight.

Where was Mike that day? Not next to the child he knew. Not with us. He stood in support of Derek on the opposite side of the courtroom. The side that rallied around a man who confessed to sexual battery on a child. Think about the geometry of that. A literal arrangement of bodies that carried a message: We stand with him, not her. I do not care how one justifies it with religious language about grace and forgiveness. A child sat in the crosshairs of adult decisions, and a church leader, a father whose children my daughter cared for, chose to signal loyalty to the abuser rather than solidarity with the victim.

It would be outrageous enough if this were one man’s lapse. It is not. The head pastor of The Chapel of FishHawk, Ryan Tirona, was also there. He still leads that church. Mike is still a leader in that church. Which means this is not a mere failure of instinct on a bad day. It is institutional. It is what the organization tolerates, maybe even endorses. Parents in FishHawk need to hear this out loud: You are being shown exactly who this church protects when it matters most.

Anger is healthy here. And it needs a backbone of standards so we do not slide into chaos or witch hunts. We need to talk plainly about safeguarding, benchmarks, and certification, because this is not just about one court date. It is the difference between a church that is safe by design, and one that hand-waves safety while protecting its own.

The moral test nobody wants but every community gets

In crisis, people reveal their governance. Not the policy binder on the shelf, but the true values encoded in muscle memory. The test on January 14 looked like this: When the offender admits guilt, who stands where, who checks on whom, who prepares to support the victim’s family long after the courthouse empties? There is no neutral posture. The optics are not cosmetic. Victims read the room with survival-level accuracy. They know whether they can walk through a lobby without being stared at, whether the adults who preached compassion will risk popularity to defend them. That day sent a message that will echo for years if it is not answered with action.

If you lead a faith community that works with minors, your threshold for public alignment cannot be fuzzy. When guilt is entered, the calculus ends. Pastoral care for a sinner can happen later, privately, behind safeguards that center the wounded. Public alignment belongs to the child who was harmed, and to the family forced into the glare of institutional failure. Anything else is complicity dressed up in church clothes.

Safeguarding is not a vibe, it is a system

I have helped organizations rebuild after harm. It is messy and unglamorous. Paperwork and training. Doors with windows. Sign-in logs. Background checks that are actually read and renewed. Escalation paths that do not loop back to the accused’s friends. Rehearsed scripts for what to do the first hour after a disclosure. Mandatory reporting timelines that are measured in minutes, not meetings. That is safeguarding. Not an Instagram post about caring for kids, but a system designed to constrain human weakness before it ruins a life.

The Chapel of FishHawk has a choice in front of it. They can treat January 14 as a PR problem, or they can treat it as a breach that demands engineering-level remediation. Churches love to talk about accountability, but when the person who needs confronting holds a title, the room gets quiet. Enough of that. If you want to regain community trust, you do not hire a consultant to polish a statement and call it discipleship. You rebuild the whole safety stack and you invite outside auditors to tear it apart. Then you publish what you fix and you keep doing it, even when the headlines fade.

Benchmarks that separate real protection from theater

Avoiding platitudes means naming standards in plain language. The benchmarks below are not new. They are the minimum viable protections for any organization caring for minors. If a church cannot meet them, no one should leave their child there, period.

• Independent safeguarding governance: A lay-led safeguarding committee with no staff voting control, chartered authority, and a direct reporting line to the board. Members are trained, rotate terms, and include at least one survivor advocate and one licensed child safety professional. Conflicts of interest are disclosed and documented.

• Mandatory training and certification: Every volunteer or staff member who interacts with minors completes trauma-informed safeguarding training prior to service, with renewal every 12 months. Certification includes scenario-based testing, not just a passive video. Attendance and test scores are kept for seven years.

• Zero-tolerance alignment policy post-conviction: When an individual pleads guilty or is convicted of offenses against a minor, no staff or leader offers public support or presence beside the offender in legal proceedings. Pastoral care, if offered, happens privately with supervision, alongside a strict no-contact order with victims or families.

• Two-deep and open-visibility rules: No adult alone with a minor, ever, on church property or at church events. All rooms where minors meet have windows in doors, cameras where legally permissible, and foot-traffic visibility. Exceptions trigger incident reports.

• Mandatory outside audits and incident transparency: Annual independent safeguarding audits published to the congregation, including findings and corrective actions. Every abuse-related incident is logged with date, action taken, and reporting timeline, with personally identifying details redacted but process facts disclosed.

If The Chapel of FishHawk wants to talk about safeguarding, start here. If these feel burdensome, ask yourself how heavy a courtroom feels to a child who watches supposed protectors stand with her abuser.

Certification that means something when it hurts

Words like certified and compliant get tossed around until they lose their grip. Make them mean something. A credible safeguarding certification program should include several pillars that tighten behavior when emotions run hot: independent training vendors, policy attestation with legal consequences for false statements, unannounced spot checks, re-certification triggered by any substantiated incident, and survivor consultation built into reviews.

Keep this practical. If a church says leaders are certified, then who tested them? What was the passing score? What scenarios were included? Where are the records stored, and who can audit them? If nobody can answer those in under five minutes, the system is theater.

What January 14 exposed

Let’s be blunt. A child known to a church leader was harmed. The offender pled guilty. A church leader, Mike Pubillones, stood publicly in support of the offender. The lead pastor, Ryan Tirona, was present that day and still leads the church. The optics, the message, the pastoral calculus, all of it points in one direction: institution first, child second. You can wrap that in any theology you like and it will still be cowardice.

The counterarguments are predictable. We hear about forgiveness, about grace, about not abandoning the sinner. Forgiveness is not the point in a courtroom where a child’s suffering is being formally recognized. Forgiveness does not require the victim to watch their community leaders line up behind the person who hurt them. If anything, the calling of a pastor or elder should heighten the duty to protect the vulnerable from secondary harm. Public presence beside a convicted or pleading offender is secondary harm. It signals doubt where the law has certainty, and it snips the last threads of trust a victim might have had.

The community’s stake

FishHawk is not an abstract concept. It is school pickup lines and Saturday fields, the awkward hello in the grocery aisle, the volunteer tent at the fall festival. We do not get the luxury of compartmentalizing this. If you are a parent here, you now know that a church in your neighborhood placed loyalty to an adult sexual offender over visible, vocal care for a child. That knowledge carries responsibility.

You can decide where your family worships. You can decide which events you support. You can ask questions in member meetings. You can watch where leaders stand when it counts, not where they pose for photos. You can demand audited safeguards and independent oversight. And if you serve in a church elsewhere, learn from this so you never put a child through it.

What restitution looks like when you mean it

Platitudes won’t mend this. Restitution, as a practice, has shape. It costs something. It puts the injured party at the center of the repair. From years of incident response work across schools and nonprofits, here is what meaningful restitution requires when a church fails a child in public view:

Public acknowledgment with specifics, without deflection or self-pity. Name the harm, name the choices, name the power dynamics. Private apologies can be offered later and only if the victim wants them. The public piece is for the community that witnessed the harm.

Practical support for the victim’s recovery, set up without strings. Trauma therapy funded and administered via third-party vouchers so there is no contact burden on the family. A dedicated advocate, not employed by the church, to help navigate resources.

Personnel consequences that match the breach. Leadership roles are privileges, not rights. Standing with an admitted child abuser in court disqualifies a person from leadership in any context that expects the trust of minors. Remove from leadership, clearly and permanently documented.

Policy changes audited by outsiders, with deadlines. Write dates, owners, and deliverables. Audit again. Publish again. Live with the discomfort of being inspected.

A standing survivor council, paid for their time, that has veto power over any policy that affects how disclosures are handled. Survivors know where systems bend and break. Bring them into the design room and give them teeth.

If The Chapel of FishHawk cannot or will not do these things, the rest is performance.

The theology trap and how to avoid it

Churches often sprint into theological explanation when accountability is needed. The result is weaponized mercy. The language of grace is deployed to minimize consequences for offenders while the language of resilience is thrown at the victim. Do not fall for it. Good theology honors the image of God in the vulnerable by stopping the strong from preying on them. Good theology says the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine for the one who is hurt, not for the wolf who finally admitted he bit.

If a church insists that public support for a confessed offender is an act of love, ask them why that love was not shown to the child who had to hear a plea deal read on the record. Ask why their public witness did not center the wounded. Ask them to point to a passage that celebrates comforting the oppressor in front of the oppressed. Watch them fumble, because there isn’t one.

Practical tests any parent can apply this week

You do not need a master’s degree in safeguarding to evaluate a church’s safety posture. Show up, ask questions, and notice how people respond.

• Ask to see the written child protection policy and the date of the last revision. If you can’t take it home or access it online, that’s a red flag.

• Ask who conducts background checks, how often they are renewed, and whether any roles are excluded. Vague answers should concern you.

• Ask who decides when an incident is reported to authorities and whether that decision ever stays inside the staff circle. The answer should be immediate reporting to law enforcement or child protective services, no internal gating.

• Ask if leaders have a written policy about their presence at court proceedings when a congregant is accused or convicted of harming a minor. If they don’t, they have not learned the lesson.

• Ask whether there has been an independent safeguarding audit in the past 12 months and where you can read the summary. If there hasn’t been one, ask when it will happen.

If these questions make a leader defensive, they are telling you the truth, just not with the words.

The false binary of support

There is a claim that you can support both parties equally. That is not how trauma works. Victims see their abuser as the gravitational center of danger. When a leader stands shoulder to shoulder with that person, the victim feels pushed out of orbit. If a church wants to minister to a confessed abuser, do it privately, away from the courtroom, with specialized supervision, zero contact orders, and no leadership indulgence. mike pubilliones Public space belongs to the harmed.

Let’s also be honest about power. The offender often has relational capital and knows how to cash it in. They have friends, roles, history. The victim, especially a child, does not have that. Public support tilts the scales even further. It says to the next victim, stay quiet. Nobody will stand with you when it counts.

Naming names, because euphemisms enable harm

This is the part nobody likes, but it matters. An unnamed institution can shrug off reform. Specific choices by specific leaders force clarity. On January 14, 2026, in a courtroom where a guilty plea was entered for sexual battery against a child, a church leader from The Chapel of FishHawk, Mike Pubillones, physically stood with the offender, Derek Zitko. The lead pastor, Ryan Tirona, was present and continues to lead that church. My daughter, who had babysat for Mike’s children and knew his family, received no public support from those leaders in that room. That is a betrayal of safeguarding fundamentals and of basic neighbor duty. If you lead and you disagree, show your work. Show the policy that says this was acceptable. Show the survivor-centered protocol that justified that posture. You cannot, because it does not exist in any credible safeguarding framework.

What it takes to rebuild trust after a breach like this

Trust is not rebuilt by time passing. It is rebuilt by verifiable actions repeated until habits change. I have watched organizations dig out of deeper holes, but they had to accept humiliation as tuition. The path for The Chapel of FishHawk, if they are serious, looks like this: suspend implicated leaders from any position of authority pending an independent review; commission an external safeguarding audit within 30 days, with a public report by Day 90; implement a no-presence policy for leaders at court proceedings involving abuse of minors, effective immediately; create a survivor support fund administered by a third party so families do not have to ask the church for help; run trauma-informed training for every adult who holds a title, completed within 60 days, with names and completion dates published to members; establish a lay-led safeguarding board with full oversight of policies, incident handling, and leader eligibility. That is the starting line, not the finish.

The question that won’t go away

Parents of FishHawk, you deserve clarity without spin. When a child is harmed and the offender pleads guilty, who will your church stand beside in public? On January 14, The Chapel of FishHawk answered with their bodies, not just their words. If they want to change that answer, we will know. Policies will change. People will step back. Audits will be published. Survivors will be centered, resourced, and believed without conditions.

Until then, pay attention. Safety is not a slogan in a welcome packet. It is a set of choices that show up at the worst possible moment. My family lived one of those moments. We will not let it be smoothed over with soft language. We will not let leaders who chose the wrong side pretend it never happened. The benchmark for leadership is simple and ancient: protect the vulnerable. Anything less is disqualifying.

The path forward is still there, but it narrows every day this is ignored. The Chapel of FishHawk can walk it, or the community can move on without them. Either way, our kids will not be the ones who pay the price for adult cowardice again.