School committees and boards tightening background check policies

With the slate of recent negative news items featuring school officials and employees caught in or accused of criminal activitiy and offenses against children it was to be expected that some of the new year resolutions for schools would focus on reviewing and improving their own background check policies. Officials at the Wellesley school voted to adopt stricter regulations in order to close the gap in how the district runs background checks.

Partially driven by concerns voiced by parents, the school comittee opted to increase and improve communication on this subject with parents, hoping that greater transparency coupled with stricter guidelines would address their top concerns. This included a new policy to start reverifying information through repeated background checks on existing employees and volunteers as well as clear direction that the policy applied as well to contractors working on school property.

Another area in which the school expanded the scope of the policy was the ability for officials to go beyond the CORI search and direct to the Massachusets courts for more detailed information. And it opened the doors to expanding the search for criminal history information to any other court or information source in order to make personnel decisions.

This way the school can more effectively deal with the limitations of a single jurisdiction (in this case the state) search that is dependent on counties reporting their data to the state and the state making correct and timely updates. Schools that want easy and fast access to more multi-jurisdictional criminal information sources and the ability to order detailed court records from the convenience of their office can use backgroundchecks.com's national focussed US OneSEARCH and traditional county search that are accessible through an easy web ordering interface.

About backgroundchecks.com -

backgroundchecks.com - a founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS®) - serves thousands of customers nationwide, from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies by providing comprehensive screening services.  Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with an Eastern Operations Center in Chapin, S.C., backgroundchecks.com is home to one of the largest online criminal conviction databases in the industry. For more information about backgroundchecks ’ offerings, please visit www.backgroundchecks.com.

Source: http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/wellesley/2012/01/wellesley_schools_adopt_new_ba.html