Background Checks

Certified teachers in Texas employed before 2003 have been exempt from national background checks.

Mar 26, 2007 - The Houston Chronicle reports that the Texas senate passed a bill that would require all public school teachers to submit fingerprints for a national criminal background check. It will mean fingerprinting 200,000 current teachers.

Texas has required national criminal background checks for all teaching candidates since 2003, but that law did not apply to teachers who were already certified. Under that law, they found 200 candidates had serious offences on record, including crimes against children and sexual misconduct.

TT - See Senate Bill 9 School Safety Act news release at Sen. Florence Shapiro's website. The bill, as introduced, would create a Texas clearinghouse that will be available to school districts and state agencies. See Texas Senate news.

TT - A New Jersey newspaper compared public records of those eligible for a public pension and another containing people charged with felonies and convicted of those or lesser crimes since the 1980s. They found 4 employees in North Jersey schools who had criminal records since they were employed. A fifth slipped through the cracks.

TT - The Philadelphia School District unwittingly hired a company to mediate student conflicts to reduce violence whose founder spent two years of a 10-year sentence in prison for a sex crime against his 7-year-old stepdaughter, not knowing he was here illegally after having been deported to his native Senegal. A criminal background check was done, but it looked only for crimes committed in Pennsylvania and didn't consider that he had an alias. No fingerprinting was required.