TEACHERS FLEE TROUBLED PASTS Steve Reilly
A fragmented state system for checking educators’ backgrounds leaves gaps that put students at risk
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 HONOR teacher’s credentials ROLL 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 13,000-plus 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 obtain a private nationwide discipline database that many states use to background teachers. The computerized analysis of the combined millions of records
revealed:
uStates 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.
uThe 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.
uState 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 3 million 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 the 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 promised a complete audit of their system.
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 data- base is only as good as the data submitted by state agencies. The analysis found the national database is not only incomplete but rife with misspellings 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 BELOW THE RADAR
Flaws in the nation’s fractured systems for checking teachers’ backgrounds are apparent in the stories of educators such as Alexander Stormer.
In March 2015, Stormer resigned from Atlanta Public Schools after a string of misconduct allegations, according to separate accounts in state Education Department and police records. Stormer allegedly injured a student’s arm dragging him into a hallway and pushed a girl into a wall, an incident captured by surveillance camera.
The state Education Department and Atlanta police reported that Stormer sent improper text messages, including naked photos, to another female student. In one text message exchange, records say, Stormer asked the girl for sex.
Despite the problems in Georgia, Stormer got teaching licenses in South Carolina and North Carolina. South Carolina was alerted to his discipline in Georgia by an update to the NASDTEC Clearinghouse, and the state revoked his South Carolina license.
In North Carolina, 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) questioned 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. Efforts to reach Stormer by phone, email and at a 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.
But Wolfe wasn’t finished teaching. She returned to Florida and was hired by Miami-Dade Public Schools. In 2012, according to Florida records, she “slapped (a) developmentally delayed 6-year-old student” in the face and was fired. Her license is permanently revoked in Florida and Colorado.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Wolfe said that 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. “I should have disclosed.”
Reva Diane Inabnett resigned from a Florida school district in 2012 after allegations that she shoved a 6-year-old led to a battery charge, which was dropped after she completed a deferred prosecution program.
Inabnett’s license is suspended in Florida, state records show. She remained licensed in Louisiana and relocated there to teach at Webster Parish schools in 2013. She taught in Webster until Feb. 8, when she resigned after an inquiry to the district from USA TODAY.
Sometimes, troubled teachers who relocate find their pasts impossible to escape forever.
After Dallas-area middleschool 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 come 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.
The televised incident didn’t stop him from teaching again. 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 NASDTEC said no one has attempted to quantify how many names are missing from the clearinghouse 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 the systems used to check backgrounds of educators “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 the 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. Nevertheless, advocacy and education policy groups continued to push for a more reliable way 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