Teacher background checks questioned

By Emily Richmond (contact)

Monday, Dec. 6, 2004 | 9:21 a.m.

After revoking the licenses of four teachers who pleaded guilty to sex-related offenses, members of the State Board of Education questioned Saturday whether Nevada's hiring process digs deep enough into the background of prospective employees.

Board member Barbara Myers asked state staff where the four individuals had attended college, wondering aloud how they could have arrived to teach in Nevada without understanding what constituted inappropriate contact with children. She appeared stunned when told by State Schools Superintendent Keith Rheault that he could not disclose the information.

"We can provide information on the status of licenses, whether they're active or suspended or revoked, but there's a specific statute that says any information contained in the actual application is confidential," Rheault told Myers and the rest of the state education board. "We've actually been subpoenaed for this information in the past and never given it."

Gary Waters, president of the State Board of Education, said he has long been frustrated by the limitations of the state's hiring practices, which include FBI background checks but prevent individual schools or principals from delving too deeply into an employee's past.

Rheault said the state has sharpened its inquiries and made it more difficult for prospective employees to conceal incidents stemming from prior jobs. In the past the state's questionnaire asked people if they had ever been convicted of a crime. That wording offered a loophole to individuals who left another state before court proceedings were completed.

"We learned from our mistake -- now we ask 'Have you ever been convicted, charged or have an investigation pending,' " Rheault said. "Now we can get them for lying on the form."

The teachers whose licenses were revoked are:

The revocations came between one and three years after the individuals pleaded guilty to criminal charges. Rheault said the delay was caused by a backlog of cases and that state staff mistakenly believed that because the individuals were behind bars, their licenses were not an issue.

"The revocation process should have been completed in a much more timely manner," Rheault said. "We won't have this kind of delay in the future."

In the case of Fletcher, her license expired last year and the revocation is retroactive.

Deputy Attorney General Ed Irvin, who is assigned to the state education department, told the board members that while employee applications are confidential, the details of license revocations are public information and state officials may share them with anyone who asks.

Craig Kadlub, director of public affairs for the Clark County School District, said his office is working on a bill draft request that would allow the state to share more of a potential employee's history. However, Kadlub noted, of the more than a dozen Clark County teachers arrested and charged with sex-related offenses in the past 18 months, all had clean records at the time they were hired.

"These were all first-time offenses -- there was no prior history to indicate those individuals might pose a threat," Kadlub said.

All of the teachers' licenses were suspended immediately following their arrests and their names were "flagged" on a national database shared with other state education departments, said Nevada Schools Superintendent Keith Rheault.

The Nevada Department of Education submits information about teacher licenses, suspensions and revocations to a database maintained by the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification. The association sends out monthly updates of license activity for individual states to compare against their own rosters.