Background Check Provision Gets Chucked From No Child Left Behind Rewrite
In the final days of debates over the Senate’s bill to replace No Child Left Behind, which passed with unusual bipartisan support on Thursday, various amendments got offered up and obliterated at lightning speed. Among the more unfortunate casualties was Sen. Al Franken’s Student Non-Discrimination Act, which proposed extending federal protections against bullying to LGBT students. Other amendments were adopted in extremely watered-down form.
One of the weakened amendments was Sen. Pat Toomey’s Protecting Students From Sexual and Violent Predators Act, which, as originally written, would have required any school that receives federal funding to submit its employees and contractors, regardless of tenure, to periodic background checks through four major state and federal registries. Sounds good, right? But the proposal, co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, met with only slightly more success than the two senators’ 2013 push to tighten the system of background checks for gun buyers in the aftermath of Sandy Hook.
I glommed onto the background-check provision for the simple reason that I myself have just barely survived the onerous process of getting approved to volunteer in my daughter’s preschool class for three hours a month next year. It was, to put it mildly, a huge pain in the ass. I had to fill out a Child Protection Registry request, on which I listed all my addresses for the past 18 years. After getting that form notarized, I had to schlep downtown to the police headquarters and fill out more paperwork for a criminal background check, and after that I had to get fingerprinted by an FBI mobile unit—all this, just to provide a monthly snack to a handful of 3-year-olds.
I was loudly annoyed by the hassle, but I understood its underlying purpose; I suppose anyone with unsupervised access to my children should submit to the same. But Toomey’s proposal—and the widespread resistance that it met—shows how complex background checks are.
Obviously, no one want wants child predators in the classroom, and all 50 states currently have teacher background check laws on the books. Forty-three states require background checks for nonteaching employees like bus drivers and cafeteriaPat Toomey background check amendment: Why the No Child Left Behind rewrite won't include it.:
