Governor orders background checks on school personnel

MANAGING EDITOR

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Local school officials say they are not concerned about orders from the governor’s office to review their policies for workers’ background checks.

“It’s just standard procedure for us,” said Portales Municipal Schools Superintendent Johnnie Cain.

“We probably go even further than a lot of schools do ... Before we start letting (student teachers) do their internships or observations, we also have them go through a background (check),” Cain said. “So we take it very seriously, and we don’t just let anybody come into the schools.”

The governor’s order was prompted this month by an incident at Albuquerque Public Schools. Former Colorado educator Timothy Jason Martinez was hired as APS deputy superintendent despite facing felony child sexual assault charges in Denver.

“He (Martinez) has no business being around children. APS dropped the ball, and it’s completely unacceptable,” Gov. Martinez said in a press release.

“I am ordering this immediate review because our parents need to know that our districts are following the law ... and providing a safe environment at all times for our children.”

Cain and Clovis Municipal Schools Superintendent Jody Balch said teachers in their district are not allowed to start teaching until background checks are complete.

“Normally, you have until the 40th day (of the school year) to get all of your paperwork in,” said Cain. “New teachers coming in, I don’t know of any that haven’t had their background check complete before they’ve come in.”

Cain said there was a new hire for the district recently whose background check had not come through yet. So school officials allowed the new hire to begin training, but did not put them in a classroom until the background check was completed.

Balch said, “We have new employees, teachers, that we just hired, who haven’t been to work yet, because they haven’t passed their background check.

“They’re waiting ... That’s how seriously we took it long before any of this (the Albuquerque incident) took place.”

Cain and Balch said the law that requires school districts to collect applicants’ fingerprints wasn’t a law until 1996. So state officials are asking all districts for evidence of background checks on district administrators and all new hires but not for teachers who have been with the district for more than 10 years.

But that’s not stopping Balch from doing background checks on staff who have been working since before 1996.

“It’s not a bad idea for everybody to have a background check,” he said.

“I wouldn’t have one except I retired, then I came back, so now I have one.”

“We think it’s a great idea,” he added. “It’s just sad that it took something like the incident in Albuquerque to get something like this initiated.”