Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee.

I am Dr. George Ann Rice, the Associate Superintendent of the Human Resources Division for the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am ultimately responsible for the staffing the positions in our district. We have approximately 15,000 teachers, 1,000 administrators, and 9,000 support staff employees district-wide, plus temporary people and substitutes.

I am pleased to testify today on behalf of the Clark County School District, the 6^th largest district in the country, soon to be the 5^th largest. I have to believe that I am testifying on behalf of school districts throughout the country, which are not even aware that this problem exists.

The Clark County School District is a rather unique school system. We are a central city school system, a suburban school system, and a rural school system all in one. Our service area of Clark County covers 7,910 square miles, which is roughly the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined. We have 289 schools: 197 in the Las Vegas, 70 schools in the surrounding suburban area, and 22 schools outside the metropolitan area in rural Clark County.

To keep pace with our rapid growth, the Clark County School District opens the average of a new school EACH MONTH. We are scheduled to open 14 new schools in August. Since 1986, we have built 157 new schools.

Each year, we must hire approximately 2000 new teachers– only 600 of whom are hired due to teacher turnover, the remainder because of our growth and our own teacher retirements. We have hired 8,000 new teachers over the last 5 years, and project to hire 10,000 new teachers over the next 5 years.

We have two State universities UNLV and UNR. We have one state college, Nevada State College, which is two years old and also a small presence of private teacher preparation programs. During the very best years, they produce in combination only 600 of the 2000 teachers we need each year.

We must go to other states to recruit the remaining 1400 teachers we require each year.

Recruiting for the 2004-2005 school year, we have made 166 trips out of state and held 107 full days of interviewing on this site. We require that every person we hire be fingerprinted. These fingerprints are sent through our school police through the Nevada Central Crime Repository (Nevada Highway Patrol) to the FBI. We have believed that when we receive a copy of the FBI report that we have a candidate’s complete arrest and conviction history from all states.

We recently learned that not all States submit their criminal records to the FBI for non-criminal justices purposes; such as employment inquiries by school districts.

At first, we considered eliminating from our recruiting schedule any state that has not released its records. However, we realized that action would be meaningless because of the mobility of our population in the United States. We must be able to access these records from all states.

All school districts are hiring teachers, administrators, and support staff who will send hours each day time working with, supervising, and guiding children. These same people will each day be alone with those children. It is imperative that school districts be aware of any and all contacts candidates have had with any law enforcement agencies for any felony, or any arrest, that involves violence, a controlled substance, child abuse, and sexual misconduct and/or abuse.

If schools districts around the country were aware of the limited nature of the information they are receiving from their FBI inquiries, they would all be here today eager to testify.