Searching for ways to better monitor teacher sex offenders, Part 2
Today’s post continues discussion of a problematic reality we referenced in our immediately preceding entry, namely this: teachers in states across the country who commit acts of sexual misconduct against children and simply relocate to jobs in other areas without repercussions.
And then reoffend.
How is that possible?
It owes to what a recent media investigation and resulting report calls “fundamental defects in the teacher screening systems used to ensure the safety of children in the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts.”
Obviously, there are many school systems to which a predator teacher can relocate that offer new opportunities to abuse children. Reportedly, many teachers know how to navigate unscathed through a system that is marked by patchwork laws and what the USA TODAY terms “inconsistent execution and flawed information sharing between states.”
Clearly, the implications of that are chilling. Sadly, they have predictably played out in a number of documented cases.
An investigative team from the above-cited paper looked at relevant computerized records in all 50 states and came to these disturbing conclusions:
- Although a privately run database contains information on problem teachers, many states don’t provide relevant data to it, which enables “troubled and dangerous teachers” to relocate undetected
- A national clearinghouse set up as a repository for data on teacher discipline is missing many thousands of names of teachers known to have come under scrutiny by state officials
One recommendation that is often made — and which we referenced in a blog post from earlier this week — stresses the need for greater federal oversight and reforms that would work to ensure a smoother and more predicable flow of key information across state lines.
Our children certainly merit that. In fact, no reasonable person questions at all that they are absolutely owed every conceivable assist that can better identify child sexual abusers and forever deny them the opportunity to ever again inflict harm on a young person.
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