Colorado School District to Conduct Sex Offender Checks on Volunteers

School volunteers in one Colorado city will soon have their names "cross checked with a sex-offender registry."  Because the registries are publicly available, the checks should not cost schools "anything but staff time." From The Daily Camera:

Boulder Valley School District leaders said earlier this month that they would consider changing their policy to require staff members to run volunteer names through free sex-offender databases. This week, officials said they’re moving forward.

“It’s not a question of if,” said Becky McClure, assistant superintendent of human resources. “It’s more the pragmatism of how that will be done.”

McClure said it makes sense to have staff members at individual schools check sex-offender registries for their volunteers. The added check will require more work for some schools than others, McClure said, but because the registries are public, cross-checking sex-offender lists shouldn’t cost schools anything but staff time.

Eric Maxfield started the discussion about stricter background checks this school year after his son returned from his first day of kindergarten at Louisville Elementary School and mentioned volunteers in his classroom. Maxfield said he wanted to know more about the non-licensed adults working with his son and learned the district doesn’t have a blanket background-check policy for its volunteers.

“Predators are opportunists by nature,” Maxfield said. “When there’s a glaring gap in an inconsistent policy, that’s where they operate.”

Maxfield said he wants the district to conduct full background checks for all its volunteers — like it does for licensed staff members and teachers.

Boulder Valley officials have said it’s too expensive and time-consuming to do full fingerprinting and background inspections for its thousands of volunteers, and Maxfield said the sex-offender checks are better than nothing.

“To me, that’s a minimum,” he said.

If the checks are truly free, this is a preferable way to address the school volunteer system. It certainly beats the system they have in Philly.

Comments

[Daniel]

This is one of those ideas that seems good on the surface but on second thought perhaps isn't. These registries are known for being incorrect and/or out of date; it gives a false sense of security to the school.

“Predators are opportunists by nature,” Maxfield said. “When there’s a glaring gap in an inconsistent policy, that’s where they operate.”

That is just total BS. Child molesters are not volunteering to be in classes and foundling students. Show me where this is happening. It really is a solution looking for a problem.

[Yally]

Louisville Elementary made national headlines the years my kids attended for cancelling it's Halloween Carnival. It's riddled with 'concerned parents'looking for a cause. Mr. Maxfield should be volunteering his own background information, and volunteering in his son's classroom. If he spent as much time volunteering there as I did, he would find there's not that much molesting going on.