Would You Trust Lindsay Lohan With Your Preschooler?

The ever-troubled Lindsay Lohan still has almost 116 hours of community service to complete, as payback for a reckless driving charge in 2012. For some reason, she’s been given the okay to start working at a Brooklyn preschool, since parents of preschoolers love having their kids around reckless drivers. Granted, she won’t be driving them anywhere, but preschools screen their volunteers, and a reckless driving charge is probably one of the deal breakers.

To make things even weirder, a couple of her fans are already camping outside the school in wait, and I’m sure they will be joined by paparazzi, at least if any of them can be convinced that she’s going to show up. Lohan has a history of not showing up where she’s supposed to be. That said, she has to finish her community service by May 28, or risk jail time. She’s had three years to take care of it, but something always seems to get in the way.

A supervisor at the school hasn’t really heard the details, but mentioned that Lohan has served there before, and things went well. “She was nice and she had freckles,” reported one of the students who remembers her. “She sang songs, and we did all the dance steps.”

I can buy that. I confess I still have a soft spot for Lindsay Lohan. I think stardom just ripped her apart, but she was, and still could be, a talented, very natural actress. It wasn’t just Mean Girls and The Parent Trap; I remember her very first TV role, on the soap opera Another World. She was startlingly good. I had one other friend who watched the show, and at the time we talked about how she just waltzed right into the role and owned it on her first appearance, something most adult soap actors take weeks to warm up to. She was 10.

So maybe she will be fun, and they say her volunteering will be restricted to administrative work and arts and crafts. But the whole idea just begs the question: Should working at a preschool be a punishment? I know parents don’t get to screen each volunteer themselves, but surely you’d get a say if someone wanted to team your toddler up with Lindsay Lohan. And forget Lindsay: Is this even an appropriate choice for community service in general, when even parent volunteers are background-checked and fingerprinted? Do we want people volunteering with their kids because their only alternative is jail time?

Look on the bright side: At least it’s not Charlie Sheen.