Protect Your Child Online

Most parents sent their children back to school last month into what we hope is a safe environment for kids, but inmate records are apparently being overlooked.  Unfortunately, our confidence that our schools are performing thorough inmate records searches is often misplaced.

According an article in USA Today, a special education teacher from Texas who was determined to have been responsible for the death of a student is now teaching at a public school in Virginia.

The police ruled the death of Sedric Napolean, a 14-year-old special needs child a homicide but a grand jury declined to indict this teacher for murder.

The teachers name was placed in a state registry of people who have abused or neglected children, but that didn’t prevent a public school in Virginia from hiring her.

It already is widely known that most schools do not perform regular drug tests on teachers but it would surprise many parents to learn how many teachers are able to get jobs in public education without going through a background check.

Solutions for Parents looking into Background Check

Parents should be writing letters and lobbying congressman as a long term solution. For the immediate future no parent should feel should feel any hesitation in conduction background checks of their own.

If you discover that your child’s middle school teacher has a criminal record that the school district either didn’t know about or didn’t feel compelled to act on. Your not only protecting your child but hundreds if not thousands of children that could have been exposed to a criminal.

It would be great if we could trust school districts to properly screen their  potential teaching staff.  In cases where they don’t, it’s too important to be ignored.

How to Conduct You Own Background Search
1.) Get all the relevant information about the individual that you can
2.) Go the state court house near you and request a copy in person
3.) Report any suspicious behavior immediately

If you need the information without a trip to the courthouse, exactly the same information can now be obtained online. If you don’t want to prolong the suspicion any further,  search criminal or inmate records. It may save you time.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 9:00 am and is filed under Child Safety Tips . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.