Background Check on School Bus Drivers

Caring for schoolchildren is a tremendous responsibility resting not just with teachers, but also with other personnel, like school bus drivers, foster care parents, day care providers and other school employees. Even if for a long time there was no nationwide program for background checks for any of these categories of employees interacting with children, it's quite a time since some states and counties started implementing such programs, and some valuable experience started to build up towards creating and adopting standards for bigger scale school employees background check programs.Good example comes from Ohio. Since the summer of 2007, free criminal background checks for school bus drivers against Ohio Hamilton County court records started being offered by the Office of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts. The program capacity allows to cover 23 public school districts and over 100 private schools across the county, and if criminal information concerning an individual doing bus driving for a school is detected, notification is released immediately to the appropriate school district. These background checks go way beyond the existing state law providing for a simple search of driving and DUI records database, and they are totally free of charge. A similar program previously was implemented with success by the initiative of Hamilton County Clerk of Courts regarding foster parents.On the state level, solidly funded bus drivers licensing Program, providing for mandatory background check for school bus drivers, is currently deployed in New York. According to the provisions of this Program, new school bus drivers must undergo fingerprinting and submit to a criminal history check. Individuals with history of certain serious criminal offences are not allowed to drive a school bus. From the other hand, the New York state law allows school bus drivers to work while their background history is still being checked.The general setback of the majority of the existing local background checking programs lies in them normally covering school bus drivers who are already hired, while the FBI believes the biggest threat may be expected from the newest applicants. Just imagine a member of terrorist organization getting employment of the sort aiming to seize a school bus full of pupils. FBI is expected to launch its own pre employment screening program for bus driver applicants in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in spring 2009. Anyway, screening each new school bus driver with this high reliability criminal background check program will be taking up to 90 days, which poses real issue. A criminal driving a school bus with children even during 3 minutes can already put their lives at risk, not to say 3 months. Digital fingerprint scanning technology could accelerate the process, if implemented.