Reply to Should parents who volunteer in schools be fingerprinted and subject to background checks?

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Reply to "Should parents who volunteer in schools be fingerprinted and subject to background checks?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is equired in Baltimore City schools even for people who volunteer in the classroom.  You must be fingerprinted at district headquarters.  I am surprised it isn't required elsewhere.[/quote]

So if you want to do something like chaperone a field trip, you have to go get fingerprinted at police district headquarters?

What problem are we trying to solve here, exactly?[/quote]

This is required for everyone apparently including parents.  Have you ever looked at the sex offenders' registry?  There are some parents on it at the school where I work.  I wouldn't want a person coming into my child's school to volunteer who has a record.  Would you?  How else would the school know if they didn't send that person for a background check?[/quote]

But the unintended consequence of this is that most Kindergarten parents can't volunteer, or come to lunch, or bring their kids cupcakes on their birthday, or chaperone field trips before about December, because that's how long it takes for the background checks to go through.

I think that running all parent names through the sexual offender registry (which takes minutes, as opposed to months like fingerprinting), and excluding anyone who comes up, and then allowing other parents to volunteer, contingent on line of sight supervision by a paid staff member, is a reasonable middle ground.[/quote]
Fingerprinting results shouldn't take months if done electronically, rather than ink rolled. I used to do faculty background checks at a local (non-school) educational institution, and we would send folks to get printed at a center on Wisconsin Ave. we would get the results back in 36 hours, tops.

The issue here would be price, I'd think. This costs about $37, if I'm remembering correctly, but that was for both MD and federal results. Don't know if it would be less expensive if you were just running a state check. (I'm in another state now, at a co-op where all volunteer parents have to be printed--even though we're never alone with the students--and it wasn't a problem at all.)[/quote]

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