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Tuesday, 27 November 2007 |
BY ANNIE ZELM
Staff Writer
WAPAKONETA — School administrators across the state will soon be taking an extra step in the hiring process to protect the safety of students in light of teacher misconduct making headlines.
School faculty members who are newly hired or under a contract renewal can expect to pay an additional $25 to $30 for background checks, due to a bill waiting for Gov. Ted Strickland’s signature.
House Bill 190, which recently passed through the state Senate, requires every staff member to undergo a background check through the FBI in addition to the routine Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (BCI&I) check upon hiring or renewal of a contract.
In Auglaize County, Educational Service Center Superintendent Patrick Niekamp said he is preparing for the influx of testing by purchasing the hardware to conduct FBI background checks in addition to state BCI&I checks.
The ESC assumed the responsibility of conducting background checks for the majority of the county’s educational staff in the past, but most teachers were only required to undergo the BCI&I background check.
“When we talked about it last year, we discussed the possibility of adding FBI capabilities to the machine we have,” Niekamp said. “The hardware cost about $8,000 at that time, and we didn’t have that many coming in who needed the FBI check because most had lived in Ohio for more than 5 years.”
Faculty members who had not resided in Ohio for at least five years were required to undergo the FBI background check upon their hiring or license renewal.
Those tests were administered at the Auglaize County Sheriff’s Office adjacent to the ESC building.
Niekamp said the ESC assessed the BCI&I testing costs to the agencies—$20 per person for school districts, and $25 for non-profit agencies in the county.
With the expected influx of faculty required to undergo FBI and BCI&I background checks beginning in April, Niekamp said he felt it necessary for the ESC to have its own equipment.
Teaching licenses are renewed every five years, so Niekamp estimated 20 percent — 100 of the county’s approximately 500 teachers — will require testing each year.
Teachers who were issued permanent teaching certificates more than 10 years ago will likely be tested over a two-year, he said.
The FBI testing will be done electronically, which can be completed within days in contrast to fingerprinting, which sometimes took several months, he said.
The price for FBI hardware came down to approximately $6,100, he said, and the ESC would use it in addition to the BCI&I equipment already in place.
Several staff members are trained to conduct BCI&I tests, but some additional training will be needed with the addition of the FBI checks, he said.
The equipment purchase did not require board approval, and no bidding process was required.
The new hardware is expected to arrive within a few weeks from The Cogent Systems, the same California-based company that provided the ESC with its BCI&I equipment.
Niekamp said they will also use the state Attorney General’s Office Web site support system to assist in the background checks.
Rep. Cliff Hite, R-Findlay, initially introduced the bill with more stringent background checks with the intent of extending Ohio Graduation Tests for one week and “became a catch basin” for a variety of other educational issues, such as enabling schools to charge for all-day kindergarten, Hite said.
The purpose of requiring state and federal background checks was to prevent teachers who had abused their position to commit crimes of a sexual nature or had engaged in any other criminal activity to be prevented from continuing to teach at another school.
In some cases that made national news, teachers who had been passed over from other districts outside of the state had criminal records which never appeared on BCI&I background checks.
The bill also requires the state Department of Education to recommend a code of conduct for educators and specify penalties for failure to report educator misconduct.
“This is just more of a check and hopefully it will curtail people we don’t want around our kids,” Hite told the Wapakoneta Daily News in a telephone interview. “It was an amendment no one could vote against, and I think it’s a win-win for everybody.”
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Last Updated ( Friday, 30 November 2007 )
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