Failure to Verify
Criminal in the Classroom
By Daniel Muniz

Quite a number of school districts in the city where I live in, San Antonio Texas employed plenty of teachers and other employees who had been convicted of sex and drug crimes. The districts either did not properly perform a thorough background check or did not even bother to pursue any additional research when the checks produced criminal information on their own employees or on applicants.

In addition, most districts require their faculty and staff to notify their central offices almost immediately after being arrested. For the most part, that never happened and many of the schools really did not care very much about it.

But what is worse is that absolute nothing was going to be done to correct this shameful situation until News 4 WOAI Trouble Shooter Brian Collister performed criminal background checks at 17 area districts. Sifting through the court records of more than 53,000 school employees, Collister discovered an alarming number of convicted employees working at numerous schools.

Incidentally, the affluent suburban school districts as well as the poor inner-city ones dropped the ball.

And if it weren’t for the WOAI news reporter investigating backgrounds, nothing would have ever been done about this. But because of the media scrutiny, education officials had to respond to their bureaucratic sloppiness. Naturally, many districts were embarrassed by the revelations, especially when they involved employees with felony drug possessions and those arrested for lewd sex acts.

Now here is where it gets scary. According to a particular news report:

Naturally, since both men were teaching in the classroom, the local news station wanted to take a look at their files. Both teachers fought back and eventually a judge agreed to keep their records unavailable to the public. Fortunately, both men resigned from their teaching positions although there is really very little to prevent them from teaching elsewhere if other districts continue to be this careless.

And it is a very sad day in our education system that the public is not even allowed to learn more about the criminal behavior of teachers in the classroom.

A former student of one of the teachers had this to say:

Of course, there are still plenty of ways to slip through the cracks such as this:

Prosecutors should have nailed him to the wall for lewdness in a public park. Instead, this teacher was able to take the rap on a different charge and escape the seriousness of having sex in a public restroom that would have prevented him from ending up in the classroom.

What people do in their own bedroom or inside their own house is their business but when they are doing out in public and get arrested for it, then that is something that the public needs to know about.

As a society, it is natural for us to hold teachers to a higher standard. If teachers cannot be responsible enough to keep themselves from getting arrested, then perhaps they are not responsible enough to be in the classroom, especially around our children.

Overall, how many school districts across the country are as irresponsible as the ones investigated the local TV station?

Unfortunately, the news wires always plenty of stories about teachers and school employees behaving inappropriately with students in different cities and states. One easy way to prevent having these bad teachers in front of our children is to not hire them in the first place.

But the problem comes right down to bureaucracy. Taxpayers are footing the bill for bloated bureaucracies in school districts therefore it is blatantly inexcusable that our education system can be this sloppy.

And if a district feels that they cannot afford to be as thorough as needed, then they need to examine their bloated budgets to replace the unnecessary items that cost a lot more than the relatively inexpensive background checks. In addition, procedures have to be put into place so that school officials know what to do the moment that this happens.

If the private sector can do it (especially now if they want to avoid costly litigation by hiring the wrong employees), then there is no reason that prevents our education system from doing the same thing.

But the problem still lies a bit deeper. Our school districts are only as good as the involvement of its citizens. If parents and district residents are not clamoring for better accountability, then this recklessness will continue. As result, parents have to get involved and demand that their schools are truly performing background checks on all of their employees.

Any opinions or views expressed herein belong solely to the author and does not represent any employer, organization, political party, governmental agency, or any other entity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the site owner or its participants.