Background checks: How they’re done in Clark County schools

By Paul Takahashi

Friday, Nov. 4, 2011 | 2 a.m.

After a local schoolteacher was arrested last week on suspicion of theft of school property and drug possession, the Sun wondered what kind of background checks are done on the 38,000 Clark County School District employees when they are hired. (The School District is the state's largest employer.)

For the answer, we spoke with the new chief human resources officer, Staci Vesneske, and the former interim chief human resources officer, Bill Garis. Here are excerpts from that interview, edited for clarity.

1. What checks are in place to prevent an employee with a criminal history from being hired?

Vesneske: You can put the background checks into two different categories. The first is the background check during the hiring process, which is a review of their previous employers and calling references.

Typically, when you’re talking about someone who has taught before, we’re calling the place they taught before to get a reference. If they haven’t taught before, we call their master teachers, who they student taught with, or their university supervisor. This takes about an hour and half to complete.

The second part: Before we make the offer, we run candidates by Metro Police to see if there’s anything local. But then, upon hire, we are required by law to run an FBI fingerprint check to see if there are any crimes in other states. It can take between a month and six weeks to get the results back.

2. Do you do credit checks?

Vesneske: We don’t do a credit check with all hires. It has to be relative to the job, so we would do a credit check for accounting positions.

Garis: We’re limited to doing checks that would reveal issues that have a nexus to the position. For example, when we’re hiring bus drivers, their background is going to include their driving record, whereas that’s not a nexus for a teacher position. There are a lot of legal and privacy issues that play into this, and we are restricted somewhat to the number of things we can do.

3. Why is the School District restricted on what kinds of checks they can do?

Vesneske: Districts are making these decisions so they wouldn’t be accused of discriminatory practices. We only do the tests that are related to the jobs that the person is applying for.

4. How about drug tests?

Vesneske: We do drug testing for certain positions. We do random testing of bus drivers, but not for teachers. That’s because there have been cases out there where a district was unable to make the argument that there was a nexus to the job. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t school districts doing drug tests – there could be people doing it, but at this point, we haven’t decided to do drug testing with teachers.

5. The Mack Middle School teacher arrested last week was a first-year teacher who had a clean background check. Is there any way the School District can prevent hiring a bad teacher who has a clean background check?

Vesneske: We have many practices that prevent (bad hires), but for someone who has an otherwise very clean record, it’s very difficult to predict. We have processes that have been used to hire (at one point) 2,000 to 3,000 new teachers every year. This year, we hired 500 new teachers.

Once we found out about (the arrest), the appropriate action was taken and we addressed these issues immediately. We can’t discuss (disciplinary actions) because they are not public documents. There are certain protections in place for teachers.

6. Is there anything you’re looking to change with the background check process in light of this incident? Any message to worried parents?

Vesneske: We’re always looking to improve our practices. If we see there’s a trend we need to address, then we definitely need to get with legal counsel and determine what would be an appropriate practice still within the parameters of what would be supported in the legal arena. When you look at the fact that we have 38,000 employees and around 18,000 teachers, you have to determine if this is a random event. We need to go back to the data to see.

People who have kids in school are always going to be concerned about who is teaching their kids. If you do see a concern, you have to report it. We need to hear that information so we can investigate.