School Employee Background Check Legislation

In October 2013, the House passed the Protecting Children from Violent and Sexual Predators Acta bill mandating districts to complete background checks on school employees. Soon after companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). Today, Toomey and Manchinare exerting significant pressure on Senate Education Committee staff and leadership to pass their companion legislation (S.1596) immediately and send the bill to the President to sign into law. The background check bill passed overwhelmingly in the House and AASA has been working for months with Senate staffto improve the legislation to ensure it is not a burdensome, duplicative unfunded mandate placed on districts. Many Senate offices want to address some of the concerns brought up by AASA about S. 1596, but we need your helpreiterating why the bill must not pass as currently written.

Under Toomey/Manchin, districts are responsible for conducting background checks on all individuals seeking employment in the district, who are employed by the district and have a job duty that results in unsupervised access to students, or are contracted to provide services for the district and have unsupervised access to students. The following checks would need to be run on all employees: 1) a search of state criminal registry or repository of the state in which the school employee resides, 2) a search of state-based child abuse and neglect registries and databases of the state in which the school employee resides, 3) a FBI finger print check, and 4) a search of the National Sex Offender Registry. These checks must be conducted “periodically,” but the specific frequency is determined by state law or by the school district when no state law exists. Each potential or current school employee must be provided with the results of the criminal background check and provided the opportunity to appeal in a timely manner. A school district is allowed to share with another school district the results of a school employee’s recently conducted criminal background check if the district is considering hiring the school employee. A school district may not knowingly transfer or facilitate the transfer of any school employee the district knows, or has probable cause to believe, has engaged in sexual misconduct with a student. The school district or State Education Agency may use administrative funds received under ESEA to pay for any reasonable fees for background checks.

AASA talking points:

  • ESEA must be reauthorized and efforts to amend ESEA to mandate a federal school background check bill outside of full reauthorization is inappropriate and unwarranted, particularly when so many critical ESEA issues are not being addressed by Congress.
  • If a background bill passes, Congress must require states to designate a state entity to conduct the school employee background checks, report the results of checks to school employees and districts, and manage and investigate appeals of erroneous background checks. Districts do not have the capacity to take on this enormous administrative and financial burden—a state entity must be charged with administering and managing all aspects of the checks.
  • Any new federal background check legislationshould apply to prospective school employees only.
  • Congress must define school contractors more narrowly, so that only contracted individuals with direct, unsupervised contact with students are required to pass these background checks.
  • The vast majority of states do not require districts to check state child abuse registries when hiring school employees and no federal investigations of state school background check policies have found that individuals on child abuse/neglect registries are committing violent or sexual crimes against students. These databases are a mess and they contain many inaccuracies, which is why a congressional taskforce concluded it would be impossible to create a national child abuse database
  • Attaching this bill to ESEA implies that districts may be responsible for the costs associated with this mandate; there must be explicit language stating that districts are not responsible for the cost.