Jessica Garate and KRQE have reported that state law requiring background checks of school employees, has been skirted. (link)
State Senator Joe Carraro says that the legislative intent of the law was that all employees be screened. Many school districts, including the APS, have interpreted the law to mean that they had only to screen new applicants.
School Board President Paula Maes said that many school districts would like to do the checks, " ... but just don't have the money or the means ..." to check all employees.
APS has the money and the means; they just chose to spend them elsewhere; filling their UAC with new ranks of administrators, for example.
Ms. Garate reported that APS Superintendent Beth Everitt refused to be interviewed on the subject.
...which is wrong, right?
I mean, a public servant can't just refuse to answer questions about the public interest and their public service, right?
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Spinning the background check problem
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2 comments:
Instead of running Triple I backgrounds on whistleblowers and potential mates of administrators, some of that "investigative time" could have been spent on backgrounding employees as stipulated by state law.
This is why APS Police should have their own NCIC terminal and an open to the public log of who has been run for what. Exceptions to revealing who has been run for ongoing investigations, but any time someone is charged with a crime and puts up a legal defense, the prosecution has to reveal their ammunition to the defense anyway. Maybe the logs become public in two weeks to keep anyone from finding out they are about to be hit with a search warrant for stolen school computers.
If APS Police had an NCIC terminal, they could check out all APS employees at no actual cost except man hours. The graveyard dispatcher could run say 50 per night. Hopefully he would also be busy with entering the stolen APS Property and such for that day as well, making it possible for other jurisdictions to recover it.
At 50 checks per night, that is 650 a week. Twelve months and you get about 7500 emplyees that could be backgrounded each year just by using the NCIC. For "free" by existing employees.
If you want to run everyone in a more timerly manner, then hire a security company to run them, they will do it on a per item basis. Or devote an APS Police officer, sergeant, or Lt. to do it full time until it is done, a special assignment. You could run a bunch of checks if that is all you did and had the personal identifiers you needed in a computer list already.
Anyways, APS could use existing resources, or ask the sheriff or APD or the state police to do it, or hire private contractors if the law stipulates to run a certain limited type of check on people for past criminal history.
J. Lopez
Good Post, Gives Me Ideas and Insights more on background check
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