Posted on 08/04/2002 9:56:08 AM PDT by sinkspur
If you want your child to attend St. Rita Catholic School this fall, be prepared to answer a few tough questions.
For the first time, the school is asking all of its parents to undergo a background check before the school year starts. Other area Catholic schools are considering a similar move.
"We want to make sure the school environment is as secure as it can be," said Elena Hines, St. Rita's principal.
Kenneth Trump, a national expert in school safety programs, said he hadn't heard of a public or private school going as far as St. Rita is.
"It sounds like they're taking it to the next level," said Mr. Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services in Cleveland. "Lots of private schools do an informal screening of parents, but it's not commonly phrased from a school safety perspective."
Dr. Hines said the heightened security is partially in response to recent revelations of child molestation by Catholic priests. But it's also meant to ease the concerns all parents have about their young children at school.
"If we have every parent have a background check, then every other parent will know their child will be safe," said Charles LeBlanc, director of schools for the Dallas Diocese.
Since the mid-1990s, St. Rita has required fingerprint-based background checks for all school volunteers who spend time with children. Dr. Hines said that included less than one-third of parents last year. Volunteers are fingerprinted again every five years to recheck for criminal records.
Under the new policy, those volunteers would still be fingerprinted. But now Dr. Hines said all other parents will be asked to undergo a separate, "very thorough" screening process – even if they never plan to volunteer for the school.
Parents will have their names checked against the contents of state criminal databases. They won't be fingerprinted, but school staff will check three personal references for each parent. Parents will then attend a 3 ½-hour training session on "what is appropriate behavior with children, what's inappropriate, and how you can be alert to watch for trouble," Dr. Hines said.
The new screening is being required of all new parents at the school, and strongly encouraged of all other parents. In addition, new parents will have to sit down for an interview with a member of the school's safety committee.
"I think the times call for us to clamp down on security some," said Shawn Young, a former parents' club president whose children have attended St. Rita for the last 12 years. "Every parent comes in contact with someone else's child some time or another, so it makes sense to check everyone."
After the recent slew of molestation revelations within the Catholic Church, Dr. Hines said, it made sense to toughen the requirements. "Because of everything that came to light this year, it just made this something for us to do to be certain, absolutely certain that we had covered all our bases," she said.
Dr. Hines said since the K-8 school began fingerprinting seven or eight years ago, "about two" people have been found to have backgrounds that kept them from being appropriate school volunteers.
Because they can be more selective in whom they admit, nonpublic schools are often more stringent in setting requirements for parents. "Most public schools I deal with wish they had some of these same tools at hand to use," Mr. Trump said.
Dr. Hines said she didn't know how much the new policies would cost, but it will likely be a substantial investment for the 660-student campus. Fingerprint background checks of state and federal databases cost about $40 per person; checks without fingerprints are available for lower costs from private vendors. Just checking the references of all St. Rita parents will tax the school's staff, she said.
"The price is certainly worth it for the security," she said. "We wanted to be sure we were doing the best we could to avoid any harm to children."
Security at St. Rita has been a concern in part because of its location, at the intersection of busy Inwood Road and the Dallas North Tollway.
In the last several years, St. Rita has tightened its building security substantially, keeping all doors but the front entrance locked and requiring visitors to sign in at the front office and wear a identification badge. Once they sign in, visitors have to be buzzed into a secure set of interior doors before they reach classroom areas.
Dr. Hines said parental reaction to the new policy has been positive.
"Changes like the doors were difficult for some parents to accept," said parent Anne O'Brien. "But I respect that they're trying to do everything they can. This may be a bit farther than necessary, but they'll find a happy medium between too strict and too loose."
Dr. LeBlanc said the diocese sets broad rules for school security, including the volunteer fingerprinting requirement, but most decisions are left up to individual campuses. He said other area Catholic schools had been discussing instituting a similar requirement for the new school year, but he did not know if any other than St. Rita were following through.
Hmmmmmmmmm.............priests molest kids and now they want to check the parents? What is REALLY sad is the fact that a pedophile priest usually has no criminal record thanks to the diligent work of sympathetic bishops........but, by all means, harass the parents. It'll make'em feel safer (sarcasm/func/off).
I would suspect this will also reveal domestic violence situations that schools may want to be aware of.
Of course, if parents don't want to submit to background checks, they can send their kid to another school, or a public school, where background checks will NEVER occur.
Very good practice. Wish all schools would do this. Presumably back and side doors are set up so that they can be exited in case of emergency but not entered from the outside.
Two priests have been reassigned and one has been stripped of his extra-parish duties for not doing background checks on teachers and volunteers and, yes, themselves.
The Diocese of Dallas requires the equivalent of a NSA defense clearance to get anywhere near kids.
Unfortunately, as someone already mentioned, bishops have been successful in keeping some stuff off the police blotter. Background checks are worthless in those instances.
Given that there's a waiting list for St. Rita's, it's likely that no parent with a criminal record will see his kid in this school.
It sounds like they're taking it to the next level," said Mr. Trump
Very good practice. Wish all schools would do this. Presumably back and side doors are set up so that they can be exited in case of emergency but not entered from the outside.
I agree with you. Our local public high school has a very stupid "open campus" policy. Kids are coming and going in and out of all the doors all day long. Because of all the foot traffic, it's impossible to monitor what's going on. I complained to the principal that I had not signed the permission form for my daughter to participate in open enrollment yet I found out she had left the school for lunch with friends one day. His response was that they simply cannot keep track of every student and rely on parents and the kids themselves to follow the policy.
I see this as a huge safety issue. One day a man came into the commons area and was handing out literature on an upcoming concert. He told the group of freshman girls at my daughter's table that if they took 20 handouts and gave them to friends, they could go backstage at the concert. Well, any idiot knows this was totally bogus, but 14-year old girls can be gullible. The incident was a clear demonstration of the safety issues involved in open campus. It's also an academic impediment because kids don't stay for study halls and register for the fewest possible classes needed for graduation credits because they know that if they are not in class they can leave. In my opinion the whole policy is just an administrative cop-out. The school likes the idea of fewer students around and it relaxes demand on providing elective courses.
I am trying to fight this through our school board. Unbelievably, most of the opposition to eliminating open campus comes from parents. Their rationale is usually because it allows more hours for part-time jobs for junior or because it "gets students ready for college life." Duh.
or perhaps they don't want any kids with a mom who is a stripper.
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