" Who's On Your Campus? Have You Checked The Sex-Offender List Lately?"
By Suzanne Bogdan, Esq., managing regional partner at Fisher & Phillips LLP.
While school administrators monitor their employee
and job applicants rolls for sex offenders, they face another challenge: discovering and restricting sex
offenders who are employee relatives, volunteers, contractors, even individuals
authorized to bring students to and from campus.
As a practical matter, many schools do not conduct
criminal-background checks on these people. Nor do they compare names and photo IDs of visitors with
information on a sexual-offender/predator website.
Does a school have a duty to notify parents and
employees that an individual with access to campus is a se offender? Should administrators suggest to
parents that they not send their children to someone’s house or a non-school
event because there’s a likelihood that a predator will attend?
The answers are not simple. The school could inform its community
by posting the offender’s photo on campus, but that individual may have legal
rights that prevent him or her from being publicly identified.
Identifying sex offenders.
There are numerous and fairly straightforward
processes for school administrators to identify and restrict sex offenders who
are not employees but have access to the school’s campus and its students:
1.
Subject all non-employees visiting or performing
work at the school to a search on an established sex-offender database, such as
the one run by the Department of Justice.
The FBI also has a list of state registries. If the school has the resources, it can swipe driver
licenses and run them against an offender database. To be effective, the school must restrict access to one or
two campus entrances so that no one slips by.
2.
Alternately, assign an employee sworn to
confidentiality or hire an outside company to check names that the school
collects against those databases.
This once-a-year review is not as effective, but it is less
expensive. The success of this
approach depends on having complete records of employee spouses, partners and
relatives and of people authorized to drop off or pick up a student.
3.
Compare the names of coaches, volunteers and others
who are likely to have unsupervised access to children to a sex-offender
list. That includes employees of
any firm that operates a program on campus. The best practice is to reqiore individuals to submit to a criminal
background check as a condition of engaging in school-sponsored activity, such
as a sport.
School administrators often wonder how wide to cast a net to
find people with unsupervised access.
The best advice is to investigate any individual who can interact with
or encounter children on campus without having a cleared adult present. That includes a parent who volunteers
for the school play, an adult who leaves his or her parked car to drop off or
pick up a child, and a contractor’s employee who uses a children’s restroom.
Lines of defense.
Administration efforts to uncover sexual predators will
likely produce a disquieting number of individuals. Some may be relatives of school employees, even their
spouses. How can this happen? Employees may keep their spouse or
partner’s secret because they thought the conviction was in error.
That reasoning absolves no one. As a matter of school policy, each current and prospective
employee should be required to report to an administrator any information about
a potential visitor who is a sex offender or is facing criminal or civil action
alleging inappropriate sexual activity with a minor. Employees who fail to follow that rule should be terminated.
Once administrators identify a sex offender with a
connection to its school, they must take action to remove or restrict that
individual from the campus and
school-related activities. This is
where the lawyers come in.
The process starts with a scripted conversation with the sex
offender, followed by a letter that legal counsel has reviewed. The letter specifies restrictions on
that person’s access to campus and school activities.
Some parents will object. They may say that they rely on this person to transport
their child to and from school.
They may want the individual to see their child playing a sport or appearing
in a performance. Graduation
brings families together, and parents will complain when the school tries to
prevent a cherished relative attending.
Address each situation as it arises while maintaining a
uniform policy. An attorney can be
of great value here in crafting a response to each challenge to school
rules. For example, a family
member may be granted access, but only if the individual registers with an
administrator upon arrival, agrees to
supervision and restrictions on movement around campus, and agrees to leave
when asked.
Protecting students from sexual offenders/predators is not a
closed door process. Parents must
be informed of school policy regarding employees, relatives and visitors.
The best approach:
Explain the school’s procedures such as criminal-background checks on
employees in a school manual. That
section should include a disclaimer that while the school makes every effort to
keep predators off campus, it cannot say whether it’s safe for children to
associate with parents and other adults away from school. The manual should direct parents to
reputable websites such as the federal government’s Child Welfare Information
Gateway page on sexual abuse where they can learn about sex offenders and how
to protect their children from them.
Guest Post “Who’s On Your Campus? Have You Checked The Sex-Offender List Lately?” was featured in the August 14, 2014 number of The Edvocate.
Author is Suzanne K. Bogdan, Esq. regional managing partner at the law firm Fisher & Phillips LLP in its Fort Lauderdale office. She chairs the firm’s Education Practice Group, providing counsel to private institutions. She also works with accrediting agencies, including the National Association of Independent Schools.
