Fingerprinting no longer required for Level 3 Volunteers
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Anonymous
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From an email today. What a mess.
Dear Valued FCPS Volunteer, Thank you for your dedication and willingness to serve our students. Your time and commitment are invaluable to our schools. We are sharing an important update to the volunteer process. Effective today, we are implementing an immediate, temporary operational change to the Level 3 volunteer background check process. What this means for you: Pause on Fingerprinting: Effective immediately, we are pausing the requirement for most Level 3 volunteer fingerprinting and FBI Rap Back enrollment. If you are scheduled for an upcoming fingerprinting appointment, please cancel your appointment unless you are a mentor, host parent, or non-parent volunteer having frequent, direct, and unsupervised contact with students, which will still require fingerprinting. FCPS is charged if individuals miss a fingerprinting appointment without canceling in advance. If you have already been fingerprinted: If you have already been fingerprinted and are waiting for your Level 3 clearance, your application and fingerprint results will be processed. You may volunteer while your application is being processed. Once your application has been processed, you will receive communication directly through Volunteer FCPS regarding your status and eligibility. New Attestation Requirement: To ensure continuous safety, all new volunteers will be required to sign a Volunteer Certification Statement. This statement is a legal attestation confirming you have no history of violent felonies, physical/sexual crimes against children, or crimes of moral turpitude. Volunteers who have already submitted an application also provided a statement regarding their criminal history in their application, and do not have any additional steps regarding this attestation. This operational adjustment is necessary because the high volume of Level 3 applications has caused significant delays, which in turn impact our ability to clear volunteers quickly and effectively. Our goal is to streamline the process while keeping student safety as our top priority. Please remember that you must sign in and out using the Visitor Management System (VMS) kiosk at the school front office or vestibule every time you visit a school and wear an FCPS-issued visitor/volunteer sticker at all times. All volunteers are also still asked to refer to volunteer.fcps.edu to look for and sign up for volunteer opportunities. We appreciate your patience, flexibility, and feedback as we deploy this new volunteer management system. Please reach out to Volunteer@fcps.edu should you have any questions or concerns about this update. Fairfax County Public Schools |
Anonymous
| These people couldn’t plan their way out of a sleeping bag. |
Anonymous
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So to clarify...
"We need to verify that you do not have a criminal history with children, and the only way to do that is to fingerprint and background check you." 2 months later: "Wait, this is taking too long. Can you just pinky promise you've never hurt a child? Thanks." |
Anonymous
| Remember this is the second “walk back” of the original policy. The original policy rolled out right before the beginning of the school year, had the level 3 volunteers going to Gatehouse and presenting their documents in person, and getting their fingerprints done in person at Gatehouse as well. Exactly like a teacher, or other staff member who works with children, would have to do when they were hired. Obviously, Gatehouse did not have enough appointments to process all of these people, so then FCPS started the FieldPrint appointments (and, as far as I know, never made an official district wide announcement about it). This meant that you could go present your documents and get fingerprinted at an offsite location as opposed to Gatehouse, and they often had far better availability and there were more of them. Now they’re down to no fingerprints at all because, predictably, the whole requirement was an expensive clusterf*** for FCPS. |
Anonymous
| I got fingerprinted in mid September and still haven't been cleared. |
Anonymous
| They are realizing it isn’t working and people just aren’t volunteering. |
Anonymous
I was fingerprinted in mid-October and not cleared. Your experience doesn't give me hope that I'll be cleared anytime soon. So does this mean people who sign up to volunteer AFTER me will simply sign the statement and be cleared, while I'm still stuck in the paperwork jam? |
Anonymous
| Yep they just collected our SSNs, fingerprints, etc.. wasted our time too but who cares. I assume their cost estimate was as way off as their effort estimate. |
Anonymous
Exactly that! |
Anonymous
I worked for fcps two years ago. They should have my digital fingerprints on file. I started this process at the beginning of october and have still not been cleared |
Anonymous
| Started mid-August, nothing |
Anonymous
| If you got stuck in the old process at Gatehouse, try emailing your school’s family liaison to see if they can push your application along. Mine was pretty helpful. I don’t know that all schools have one or sometimes they cover multiple schools, but any school with high numbers of military, FARMS, or ESOL should have someone. |
Anonymous
Read to me like LOTS of people werent showing up for fingerprinting appointments and it was costing a lot of money. |
Anonymous
People from school's office or family liaisons can help with one of the steps of the process, but after that you'd still be forever stuck.. |
Anonymous
It's more like they want to be sure that now that it's no longer needed, people cancel appointments instead of just not showing. |