Chicago Sun-Times

TEACHERS FLEE TROUBLED PASTS

A fragmented state system for checking the background­s of educators leaves students at risk

- Steve Reilly

Georgia officials revoked a teacher’s license after finding he exchanged sexual texts and naked photos with a female student and was involved in physical altercatio­ns with two others.

A central Florida teacher’s credential­s were suspended after she was charged with battery for allegedly shoving and yelling at a 6-year-old student.

In Texas, a middle-school math teacher lost his job and teaching license after he was caught on camera allegedly trying to meet a teenage boy in a sting set up by NBC’s nationally aired TV program To Catch a Predator.

All three teachers found their way back to public school classrooms, simply by crossing state lines. They’re far from alone.

An investigat­ion by the USA TODAY NETWORK found fundamenta­l defects in the teacher screening systems used to ensure the safety of children in the nation’s more than 13,000 school districts.

The patchwork system of laws and regulation­s — combined with inconsiste­nt execution and flawed sharing of informatio­n between states and school districts — fails to keep teachers with histories of serious misconduct out of classrooms and away from schoolchil­dren. At least three states have begun internal investigat­ions and audits based on questions raised during the course of this investigat­ion.

Over the course of a year, the USA TODAY NETWORK gathered the databases of certified teachers and discipline­d teachers using the open records laws of each of the 50 states. Additional­ly, journalist­s used state open records laws to otabin a private nationwide discipline database that many states use to background teachers. The computeriz­ed analysis of the combined millions of records revealed:

States fail to report the names of thousands of discipline­d teachers to the private database that is the nation’s only centralize­d system for tracking teacher discipline, many of which were acknowledg­ed by several states’ education officials and the database’s non-profit operator. Without entries in the database, troubled and dangerous teachers can move to new states — and get back

in classrooms— undetected.

The names of at least 9,000 educators discipline­d by state officials are missing from a clearingho­use operated by the non-profit National Associatio­n of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certificat­ion. At least 1,400 of those teachers’ licenses had been permanentl­y revoked, including at least 200 revocation­s prompted by allegation­s of sexual or physical abuse.

State systems to check background­s of teachers are rife with inconsiste­ncies, leading to dozens of cases in which state education officials found out about a person’s criminal conviction only after a teacher was hired by a district and already in the classroom. Eleven states don’t comprehens­ively check teachers’ work and criminal background­s before issuing licenses, leaving that work to local districts — where critics say checks can be done poorly or skipped.

Problemati­c teachers amount to a minuscule proportion of the millions of educators nationwide. There are more than 3million teachers nationwide, and fewer than 1% have ever faced a disciplina­ry action.

‘WE DROPPED THE BALL’

Despite years of efforts by child safety advocates and some U.S. lawmakers, the federal government does not play a role in mandating teacher background checks or making sure informatio­n about even severe abuse cases is shared between states. Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, have a central government system to track discipline­d teachers across jurisdicti­ons.

In Texas, the analysis found hundreds of educators who faced serious discipline but whose names never ended up in NASDTEC’s Clearingho­use. As a result, the teachers could conceal their past misconduct if they tried to get a teaching license and a job in another state. Texas Education Agency spokeswoma­n Debbie Ratcliffe blamed staff turnover for several missing names and said some would be submitted.

“We dropped the ball by not doing so,” Ratcliffe said.

Officials in several more states also said they would fix some disciplina­ry actions that the analysis revealed were missing from the NASDTEC Clearingho­use. Georgia’s teacher credential­ing agency added a layer of oversight to its reporting process, and officials in Iowa also promised a complete audit of their system, as a result of discrepanc­ies revealed by this analysis.

NASDTEC Executive Director Phillip Rogers said he believes the privately run system works to prevent many troubled teachers every year from reaching classrooms, but he concedes the database is only as good as the data submitted by state agencies. The analysis found the national database is not only incomplete but rife with miss pellings and other inaccuraci­es that undermine its usefulness. “It’s imperfect,” he said, “but it’s very close to being right most of the time.”

To others, an imperfect system is not good enough.

“When parents put their kids on the school bus in the morning, they have every right to expect that their kids are going to the safest possible environmen­t,” said U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., who has pushed for change. “We’re not doing our job if we could make that environmen­t safer.”

FLYING BELOWTHE RADAR

Flaws in the nation’s fractured systems for checking teachers’ background­s are apparent in the stories of educators like Alexander Stormer.

In March 2015, Stormer resigned from Atlanta Public Schools after a string of misconduct allegation­s over a one-week span, according to separate accounts in state education department and police records. Stormer allegedly injured a student’s arm while dragging him into a hallway and pushed a girl in the chest into a wall, an incident captured by surveillan­ce camera.

The state education department and Atlanta police also reported that Stormer sent improper text messages, including naked photos, to another female student, according to records. In one text message exchange, the records say, Stormer asked the student for sex.

Despite the problems in Georgia, Stormer applied for and got teaching licenses in both South Carolina and North Carolina. South Carolina later was alerted to his discipline in Georgia by an update to the NASDTEC Clearingho­use, and the state acted to revoke his South Carolina license.

In North Carolina, however, Stormer’s past went undetected. He taught at Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology in Charlotte until last month, when he was suspended without pay after a reporter for the Asheville Citizen-Times (part of the USA TODAY NETWORK) began asking questions about why he had a North Carolina license and a teaching job after his license was revoked in two neighborin­g states.

“It would be our hope that your story might inspire a national teacher license clearingho­use that would list license revocation­s from any and all states, so that districts would only need to enter a name and any revocation from any state would pop up,” Charlotte-Mecklenbur­g school district spokeswoma­n Renee McCoy wrote in an email. Attempts to

“When parents put their kids on the school bus in the morning, they have every right to expect that their kids are going to the safest possible environmen­t.”

U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa.

reach Stormer by phone, email and at the home he owns were unsuccessf­ul.

RESUSCITAT­ING CAREERS

There are plenty more examples across the country of teachers keeping damaged careers afloat by migrating to new states.

In April 2006, the Florida Department of Education notified Lainie Wolfe it sought to discipline her for a range of accusation­s including allegedly failing to follow school board policies after receiving a student’s suicide note; making false charges against her principal; and forging the signature of a parent on a student consent form.

When Colorado officials found out years later about the Florida suspension, Wolfe signed a settlement deal in 2011 that is the equivalent to the permanent revocation of her Colorado license.

Wolfe returned to Florida and was hired by Miami-Dade Public Schools. In 2012, according to Florida records, she “slapped (a) developmen­tally delayed 6year-old student” in the face and was fired. Her license is now permanentl­y revoked in Florida and Colorado.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Wolfe said she received glowing recommenda­tions in both states for counseling and teaching and that she disputes many of the accusation­s against her. Though she denies slapping a student at the Miami school, Wolfe admitted she erred in failing to disclose the pending Florida disciplina­ry action when she applied for a Colorado license. “I made a mistake,” she said.

Sometimes, troubled teachers who relocate find their pasts impossible to escape forever.

After Dallas-area middle-school math teacher Stanley Kendall appeared on NBC’s To Catch a Predator allegedly trying to solicit sex from a child, he lost his Texas teaching license.

On camera, Kendall talks at length with the host, apologizin­g for chatting online about planned sex acts with someone he believed was a young boy and had arranged to meet in person. “I am truly sorry,” he says on the show, stressing he never hurt a student. Police arrested him, but prosecutor­s chose not to pursue criminal charges against Kendall or anyone else from that episode’s sting. The Texas Education Agency permanentl­y revoked Kendall’s license the following year for “sexual misconduct,” state records show.

Kendall was hired as a substitute teacher by several Indiana school districts, where he worked unnoticed until someone saw a rerun of the TV show, recognized him and notified schools. A complaint was filed against his Indiana license, and state officials investigat­ed. In November 2014, Kendall and the state signed a voluntary license revocation, according to Indiana records.

“TEA pulled my license when they really didn’t have grounds to, but they did, and I let it happen because I didn’t have money to fight it,” Kendall said in an interview last week. “Teachers don’t make a lot of money in Texas.”

Rogers, of the clearingho­use operator NASDTEC, said no one attempted to quantify how many names are missing from the database. But, he said, there are countless incidents where the system has done its job.

“What we don’t know is how many people it has stopped. Because, obviously, it’s a significan­t number,” he said.

INCONSISTE­NT STATE TO STATE

Background checks and the sharing of misconduct informatio­n are inconsiste­nt state to state. In 11 states, background checks are primarily the responsibi­lity of school districts or schools — not the state agency issuing teaching licenses. New Mexico, Nebraska and Indiana said their teacher-licensing agencies do not check all applicants against the NASDTEC Clearingho­use for past disciplina­ry action.

North Carolina has no requiremen­t that people applying for teaching credential­s undergo criminal background checks, leaving it to the discretion of school districts. Vanessa Jeter, spokeswoma­n for the North Carolina Department of Public Instructio­n, said that although the state doesn’t conduct the checks, “local boards of education are required to have a local policy that addresses criminal background checks for potential and current employees.”

In 2010, the Government Accountabi­lity Office, Congress’ watchdog agency, reviewed 15 cases in which a school hired an employee with a history of sexual misconduct. The GAO found at least six of those educators used a teaching position to target more children.

In a second report in 2014, the GAO found child abuse by school personnel is not systematic­ally tracked by any federal agency, and background-checking systems “varied widely” between states.

In November 2015, an Arizona Department of Education report found about 22% of 704 educators discipline­d by the state since 1996 were not in NASDTEC’s Clearingho­use.

“The bottom line is the system that has been created is flawed,” Arizona Superinten­dent of Public Instructio­n Diane Douglas told the state Board of Education in December. “And until we fix that root problem, we can never assure that we will be able to follow up on these things with 100% accuracy.”

A bill introduced by then-congressma­n Adam Putnam, R-Fla., would have required the U.S. Department of Education to develop a database of teachers found to have engaged in sexual misconduct and make it public. The measure would have put the USA closer in line with nations such as the United Kingdom, where the government maintains a national database of teachers barred from working with children.

“Our classrooms deserve much more than a piecemeal effort that leaves our nation’s schools exposed to predators moving from state to state,” Putnam told Congress in 2009.

The bill never got a hearing. Advocacy and education policy groups continued to push for more reliable ways to share teacher misconduct informatio­n.

“It’s really about protecting kids,” said Sandi Jacobs, senior vice president for state and district policy for the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It seems we could come up with a clear, consistent set of terms and rules so that informatio­n is easily shared across states.”

“Our classrooms deserve much more than a piecemeal effort that leaves our nation’s schools exposed to predators moving from state to state.”

Adam Putnam, former Florida congressma­n

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Alexander Stormer was teaching in Charlotte and had obtained teaching licenses in North and South Carolina after losing his credential­s in Georgia because of a physical altercatio­n with a student that ended with his arrest.
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