Schools speed up fingerprint checks

Parents soon will be able to rest easy knowing school employees have clean criminal backgrounds before they're hired.

The State Office of Education, with some school districts and a handful of universities, is buying Live Scan technology that will electronically process prospective employees' and volunteers' fingerprints — used for criminal background checks — in about a week.

Without the technology, background checks have typically taken two months, and earlier this year a five-month backlog was reported. Some school districts say they can't wait that long and have hired workers before knowing for certain if there were any criminal misdeeds in their past.

"What has concerned me the most with the five-month delay is we could have hired a serial killer, we could have hired the Boston Strangler, because we had no clue," said Joan Patterson, coordinator of educator licensing at the State Office of Education. "So far, we've been lucky."

The Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification processes fingerprints and conducts criminal background checks for a growing list of occupations, including school workers, massage therapists, real estate agents and nurse practitioners, BCI manager Alice Erickson said.

Often, applicants are processed the old-fashioned way: fingers blotted in ink, rolled onto a card, then mailed to BCI for scanning and analysis.

But demand has strained the system. Last February, 11,000 to 13,000 fingerprint cards awaited processing — a four- to five-month backlog. Technicians worked overtime but still remained buried, Erickson said.

More than 1,700 of those fingerprint cards were for teachers, and another 15 percent for other school workers and volunteers, Patterson said at the time. Struggling with shortages, districts often hired people on the honor system.

It was not immediately certain how many hires were red-flagged with a criminal past. But Jordan District executive director of human resources George Welch said there have been a few. And one Granite District substitute made headlines several years ago because he was arrested for a sexual offense during processing, which revealed past brushes with the law.

The potential for trouble has been unnerving for school and state legislators, who learned of the BCI backlog last February.

Still, Erickson said lawmakers gave her bureau no additional cash to address it.

The backlog meanwhile has shrunk to about a two-month wait, Erickson said.