
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 9, 1992                   TAG: 9203090110
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: NEAL THOMPSON EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SCHOOL-EMPLOYEE SCREENING GETS HELP FROM ASSEMBLY

Virginia's schools are becoming ever stricter and more refined in their efforts to keep criminals - especially those involved in drugs or child abuse - off their payrolls.

Radford is among school districts that have begun to fingerprint potential employees to check their criminal histories through the FBI. It joined that list when the General Assembly recently approved a bill authorizing the screening.

Another General Assembly-approved bill will give all Virginia school districts access to the criminal records of employees and potential employees through Virginia's Central Criminal Records Exchange.

"We're looking mainly for child abusers or people involved with drugs . . . because we don't want those kind of people working for us," said Botetourt County schools Superintendent Clarence McClure.

Not all school districts do a criminal background check before hiring someone, but more have been doing it over the past five years.

The trend started, in part, a few years ago, when Maryland adopted a law requiring schools to fingerprint employees and check for a criminal history before they are hired. Then, Washington, D.C., started looking into a similar law.

Northern Virginia school districts started worrying that people would skirt the Maryland and D.C. laws and try to find jobs in their schools.

So Fairfax County became the first county in Virginia to fingerprint potential employees.

Alan Barbee, a retired police chief, was hired by Fairfax to help beef up its screening process. Since 40 percent of the county's applicants came from out of state, he helped implement fingerprinting so national background checks could be made through the FBI instead of just statewide criminal checks through the state police.

"It's a deterrent more than anything," Barbee said.

Prince William and Chesterfield counties, Manassas, Alexandria and Richmond have since begun fingerprinting. Radford will soon do the same. Superintendent Michael Wright calls it an "extra step" in screening employees and worth the extra cost: $36 for each set of prints.

Ned Carr, the state Department of Education's chief of staff, said a few cases of school districts accidentally employing ex-convicts in recent years have pressured districts into strengthening their screening processes.

"I think the public is demanding more careful scrutiny of potential school employees," Carr said.

By law, access to a person's criminal history is limited to a handful of state agencies and only six school districts. But schools all over Virginia had been gaining access to those records through their local police or sheriff's departments.

Now, a bill from by Del. Clinton Miller of Woodstock formally gives every state school district direct access to those records.

by CNB