Private Schools Receive Less Stringent Background Checks
By Michael Giusti, Staff Writer
Originally published in The Daytona Beach News-Journal, June 3, 2001
Area Catholic schools receive far less comprehensive background checks on volunteers and teachers than public schools, a difference brought to light in a lawsuit against Father Lopez High School and the Catholic Diocese of Orlando.
The parents of eight students claim in the lawsuit that, among other things, the diocese never conducted a sufficiently thorough background check on volunteer trainer Ron Johnson, thus allowing a convicted felon wanted on sex crime charges in Michigan into the school.
For four years, diocese policy has been to fingerprint and run background checks on all volunteers and teachers through the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
What may become a larger issue in the case is the FDLE's policy on such background checks.
Because state law does not require background checks for private schools, the FDLE conducts them differently than it would for a public school, where checks are required by state law.
The FDLE considers requests from private agencies, including the diocese, as public records requests rather than full background checks, attorneys at the agencies said last week. The comprehensive checks carried out by law for public schools include fingerprint checks and nationwide searches in federal government databases.
For public records requests, only the name, date of birth and Social Security number reported on the card are checked. Even then, the FDLE only searches for crimes committed or reported in Florida.
The agency only uses the fingerprints if a criminal history is found. Even then they are only used to confirm the person's identity.
The suit contends that the policy works as an honor system, allowing volunteers to take their own fingerprint cards to a police station and then trusts them to return them complete with valid, unaltered prints.
Regardless of whether the fingerprints on Johnson's cards were his, the charges against him in Michigan would not have turned up under the current system.
