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Testimony of Barbara Belak The Need for State Sharing of Criminal Information September 28, 2004 Good morning, Mr. Chairman, and distinguished members of the Committee. As the representative today of the nation’s 6th-largest school district, I would like to thank you sincerely for the opportunity to present this information to you today. I do so out of a strong belief in an ideal that I hope we all share: the ideal that all students in our nation’s schools have the right to be educated by dedicated professionals who will teach them, inspire them, and care for them – not target, victimize or abuse them. On the bright side, not long ago, we had some discussions with a private security company regarding employee background checks. As a result of those discussions, the president of the company concluded, in essence, that the Human Resources Division of the Clark County School District (CCSD) already does everything in its power to protect its students and screen out undesirable job applicants. That’s good news coming from an outside company that would have loved to sell its services to us. The bad news is: it isn’t enough. I am deeply saddened to admit that the Clark County School District has found itself in the news media far too often as the public is informed that another school district employee has been arrested for sexually molesting a student. Besides the obvious embarrassment to the district and the deleterious effect on the public trust in our schools, the real tragedy, as always, is the harm done to the victim – a child – one entrusted to our care. In addition to the trauma of the actual incident – or incidents, as is often the case – the child is subsequently subjected to re-living it over and over again, in everything from repeated police interviews and school administrative interviews, to employee dismissal arbitrations and criminal court trials. Even if the sharing of criminal information as covered in HR 2649 would only keep one single child predator away from the schools, I would still want to be here today to support this bill. To provide you with a background context for our position, I would like to note the following data. First, statistics you may find interesting: The Clark County School District is a somewhat complex school system. We are a central-city school system, a suburban school system, and a rural school system all in one. Geographically, our district covers nearly 8,000 square miles, roughly the size of Connecticut and Delaware combined. A few months ago, I would have reported that we have 289 schools, but now that a new school year has started, 14 new ones have opened, so we now have over 300 school sites. More than 200 of them are in Las Vegas, over 70 of them are in the surrounding suburban areas, and about 25 are outside the greater metropolitan area in rural Clark County. We have everything from the good, old-fashioned one-teacher school-house in Goodsprings, Nevada, to urban elementary schools with 1,200-1,300 students, to senior high schools with over 3,000 students, and in less than 20 years, we have built nearly 160 new schools. We are just now calculating our student count for this year; last year we approached 270,000 students! The Human Resources Division is charged with the daunting responsibility of staffing all 300 schools. Each year, CCSD generally hires between 1,500 and 2,000 new teachers, and that’s without saying a word about support staff and administrators; nor does it include our 100+ vacancies, particularly in the high needs areas of special education, school psychology and speech pathology. Meanwhile, however, Nevada’s state institutions of higher learning only graduate about 600 new teachers per year. CCSD alone needs far more than what Nevada’s colleges can produce, even if every single graduating teacher in the state came to Clark County, leaving our sister counties with none. So, like many other districts nationwide, we turn to other states to find teachers to bring to our classrooms and our students. In recruiting for the current school year alone, we made approximately 170 trips to 39 states, and we maintain a dynamic web-site so that anyone with Internet access to the World Wide Web can learn about our growing district and consider teaching and living in Las Vegas. As a result, we have already hired over 1,000 teachers for the 2004-05 school year from outside Nevada, and we’re still hiring. Please consider now some facts more startling in nature: Every school year, the Clark County School District initiates dismissal proceedings against teachers and support staff for incidents involving controlled substances, including safety-sensitive employees testing positive for illegal drugs. Every year, we initiate dismissal proceedings against teachers and support staff for incidents involving violence against students. And every year, dismissal proceedings are initiated against teachers and support staff for incidents involving sexual misconduct with students. On the one hand, even if there were as many as 70 such dismissal actions over the last three years, an employer might be proud to proclaim that record. After all, out of more than 25,000 employees, 70 dismissal actions over a three-year period equate to an approximate average of 23 dismissals per year – less than one-tenth of one percent of a 25,000-employee workforce. That’s really very good! On the other hand, this employer feels that if CCSD dismisses on average 23 employees each year for incidents involving controlled substances, violence against children, and sexual misconduct, then we need to do even more than we now do to protect our students better. I have already mentioned our appearances in the media when employees are arrested for crimes stemming from misconduct with children in our schools. Every time it happens, the press re-caps the former list of arrests, using such comments as, "This is the third time in the last six months . . .," or "This is the ninth time in just three years . . ." Often they summarize former details as well, reminding the public of a particular arrest or two. Each time, we are all reminded that the world can be very unfair for an innocent child. And each time, a former victim gets to re-live their own tragedy yet again. Here is the harshest reality: The data above included teachers and support staff, but if we leave out total support staff figures (since many of them are in central offices or service centers), CCSD has over 16,000 teachers spread throughout its schools. If only one percent of the teachers – and one percent is a pretty slim margin by most standards – commit misconduct egregious enough that it can harm a child, that is still 160 teachers, with potentially many more victims. If only 1/10 of one percent commits such misconduct, that is still 16 teachers. Even if only 1/100th of one percent of our 16,000 teachers is a sexual predator, that is still one or two teachers who will molest one or more children in the coming year – just in our one district – and that is one or two too many. Having been both a union advocate who assisted teachers accused of harmful misconduct, and an administrator involved in the disciplinary actions taken against such teachers, I could provide you with some specific scenarios. But I hope that is unnecessary, because I would like to believe I would be preaching to the choir. The question is not whether or not we should accept a certain percentage of bad apples as an inevitable reality in an imperfect world. The question is what we can do to identify those bad apples better and keep them away from schools. It has often been said, particularly in business and political circles, that "knowledge is power." In this technological age, that has been translated into "information is power." The cliches, perhaps, are overused, but true nonetheless – and just as true for school districts as they are for business owners and elected leaders. School districts need complete information on the applicants who are looking to work in our schools. We need to know about the domestic battery arrests. We need to know about the drug arrests. We need to know about the assault and battery arrests. And we need to know about the arrests for lewdness with a minor. Please note that I deliberately use the word "arrests," not just "convictions." We certainly recognize that innocent people can be accused falsely. But if Mr. or Mrs. Jones was arrested for lewdness with a minor in New Jersey in 1988, then again in Florida in 1992, then again in Mississippi in 1997, and again in Oregon in 2002 – with or without a conviction – would you want your son or daughter in Mr. or Mrs. Jones’ classroom getting some personal attention after school? CCSD may or may not be getting complete arrest and conviction information at present, since we currently process our new-hire fingerprints through our CCSD police. But due to factors not pertinent to this discussion, we might not always have our own police force, and many, many school districts throughout the nation never will. We know first-hand how powerful information can be. We know it because we have seen first-hand occasions when we should have been given information that we weren’t. Sometimes it is a school district in a non-criminal matter that "cuts a deal" to "clean a file" in return for a resignation. Sometimes it is another state that sugarcoats, for some inexplicable reason, a confidential reference knowing full well and good that a teacher has engaged in misconduct with a student. HR 2649 won’t help those cases; we have to look for state relief for them. But, HR 2649 can give school districts access to relevant information on applicants’ criminal backgrounds that may be being withheld at present. The Clark County School District routinely asks about 20 different background questions related to misconduct on its teacher application forms, and CCSD fingerprints everyone it hires, from the classroom teacher to the office clerk to the volunteer coach (who, technically, isn’t even "hired"). But we need to do so with the confidence that the report that comes back is complete – that it includes arrest and conviction information from all states as defined in the bill, not just some of them, especially in light of the state-to-state mobility we all enjoy in this country. As the demand for quality teachers continues to exceed the supply, we must stretch our recruiting efforts far across this vast country as we intensify our efforts to find the best teachers. Other districts may not need as many new hires as CCSD does, but school districts everywhere are hiring teachers, administrators, and support staff who will spend hours each day working with, supervising, and guiding children, oftentimes alone. It is imperative that school districts be made aware of any and all contacts that applicants have had with law enforcement agencies for any arrest for or conviction of a felony or a crime involving violence, a controlled substance, child abuse, and sexual misconduct or abuse. In closing, I would like to express my gratitude to the committee for the opportunity to present this testimony. Thank you very much for your time and for your consideration of this important legislation. |