Schools look at volunteer, visitor rules

Rebecca Hensen and a friend were looking at the state’s sex offender registry last month to see if any were living in the neighborhood where they planned to open a day-care center.

Hensen was surprised to come across a name she recognized – the husband of her daughter’s fifth-grade teacher.

After discovering the man had visited his wife at school, Hensen decided to pull her daughter out of Post Falls’ Ponderosa Elementary.

Idaho law prohibits registered sex offenders from being on the premises of home day cares and child-care facilities, but in Washington and Idaho no law restricts sex offender access to schools. Visitor and volunteer policies are left to local control.

At many schools, all that’s required is that visitors check in at the office. Volunteers’ backgrounds often go unchecked.

That’s disconcerting to Hensen and at least one other mother who has a child in the class. When they discovered a sex offender had visited the school, the parents said it raised several concerns. They want to know who else has been able to gain access to their children.

Post Falls Assistant Superintendent Becky Ford said the Post Falls School District requires all visitors and volunteers to check in at the school office. So do the Coeur d’Alene, Lakeland and Spokane school districts. At most schools, visitors are asked to sign their name and state the purpose of their visit.

Some also require visitors to wear an ID badge.

Post Falls conducts background checks on mentors, and Spokane Public Schools goes as far as to check the background on all volunteers, including parents who go along on field trips.

Ron Schmidt, assistant superintendent of the Lakeland School District, said the schools in his district have begun to check volunteers’ names against the sex offender registry. The school board is also considering an application process that would scrutinize volunteers more thoroughly, he said.

Mary Maki, volunteer coordinator for Spokane Public Schools, said the district conducts background checks on about 8,000 volunteers each year. It takes about three months each fall to check every volunteer, she said, and the process continues throughout the school year as additional volunteers sign on or as schools schedule field trips.

“It’s a big job, and it consumes a lot of time,” Maki said.

Conducting those checks on every visitor who comes on school grounds wouldn’t be feasible, Maki said. She said many visitors are also volunteers, though, and would have already been cleared.

More than 500 schools nationwide are now screening all visitors with the help of special software. Allan Measom, president of Raptor Technologies, said his company has developed a program that checks visitors against sex offender registries from more than 40 states.

Visitors present their driver’s license or ID card, which the school office scans. The program prints out a visitor’s badge, and the visitor’s name and birthdate are checked against the registries.

If there’s a match, the visitor’s picture comes up on the screen for the school worker to verify. If the match is confirmed, the software informs school administrators and law enforcement via text message.

About 1.8 million visitors have been run through the system, Measom said. A number of the sex offenders who are discovered are parents, he said.

Schools pay $1,500 to purchase the program, and then $432 every year after.

Ford said the Post Falls School District is re-examining its policies on visitors and volunteers. If, in the name of student safety, the district has to check every person who visits a school, Ford said the district will make that change.

“If we see that there is a need to put something like that in place to provide safety for our students, then it is something we would need to look at,” Ford said.

Ford said she wasn’t aware that the teacher’s husband was a registered sex offender until she received a call from a concerned parent. Immediately, Ford said, she launched an investigation.

Ford said she discovered that Principal Kathy Baker had already known that the teacher’s husband was a registered sex offender. She, too, had run across his picture on the state’s registry.

The principal consulted with her supervisor and with the police, Ford said, and had decided that if he came into the school “he would be shadowed” and that he would not be allowed to be alone with students.

“The staff here at Ponderosa takes their responsibility for keeping children safe very seriously,” Baker said Tuesday. “At no time did we have a reason to believe children were in harm’s way.”

Last week, Ford said the district had told the man not to come on school grounds again. Baker sent a letter home to Ponderosa parents on Tuesday, saying a “low-level sex offender” had been on school grounds last year. She told parents that their children’s safety was never in question and to call with concerns.

Both Ford and the teacher’s husband said he has not been on school grounds this year. The man said Monday that he had visited the school only a handful of times last year – once to eat lunch with his wife and to volunteer at events like the school carnival.

He said he’s OK with the district’s request that he not visit the school. But the man said he’s upset with Hensen and other parents for making his past an issue and said he’s even considering civil suits against those who brought his criminal history to light. A married father now, he said he’s not a threat to the safety of children.

Convicted of third-degree rape of a child in Spokane County in 1989, the man said he feels like he’s being persecuted for a 16-year-old crime. According to court records, he was 22 when he had sex with a 13-year-old. Those records say the girl willingly had sex with him and that he knew her age.

The man said he plans to petition the court to remove the requirement he register as a sex offender.

After the school district contacted him, Post Falls Police Lt. Greg McLean said he had talked to Spokane County about the man’s conviction and said there was nothing to restrict him from school grounds.

“He’s done his time,” McLean said. He questioned the feasibility of a policy that would prohibit sex offenders from visiting schools.

With more than 260 registered sex offenders in Kootenai County, McLean said, “at any school function going on, there’s more than likely going to be somebody that’s registered as a sex offender.”

Spokane County had more than 1,200 registered sex offenders in 2004.

Victims advocates like Polly Franks say it’s important to protect children at any cost.

Franks’ daughters were attacked by a sex offender who lived next door, a close family friend. She said she was best friends with his wife. Their children were best friends. The man was a regular volunteer at the school – that’s where he scouted for victims, Franks said.

She didn’t know until it was too late that he was the serial rapist who had been terrorizing her neighborhood, or that he had an extensive record of sex offenses in another state.

As a member of the board of directors for the National Coalition for Victims in Action, the Virginia woman said she has heard numerous stories about school volunteers and visitors who were discovered to have a history of sex offenses – like the “harmless grandfather” who helped with an elementary school’s cheerleading team.

She believes anyone who has access to children, anyone who sets foot on school grounds, should at least be checked against the sex offender registry.

“In my opinion, and from all that I’ve seen, it’s just not worth the risk,” she said. “There’s not a parent out there who wants to roll the dice with their child’s safety.”