SCHOOLS WANT BROAD BACKGROUND CHECKS CURRENTLY, TEACHER REVIEWS ONLY

Background checks haven't turned up any hard-core criminals in the Coeur d'Alene School District since they were instituted a year ago.

But those checks cover only six to eight western states.

School officials said they could investigate teachers more thoroughly if state legislators would pass a law enabling them to have access to a national crime database.

"Most taxpayers are shocked and amazed that we still have not been able to move forward and get a nationwide background check," said Ken Burchell, the school board member who first proposed the background checks for Coeur d'Alene teachers.

The district pays Idaho's Bureau of Criminal Identification to check for criminal backgrounds in six states. Checks in Washington and California require special permission from those states.

To gain access to the FBI's national criminal history database, a state must have a law authorizing the background checks.

The most recent legislative attempt to get the nationwide checks and require them for teaching applicants has met resistance before even getting to the floor of the House.

Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said he would kill any proposal to fingerprint applicants. He would support a law that did the background checks without fingerprinting, he added.

School officials don't know whether Schroeder's idea of a background check would do any good, and question the resistance to fingerprinting.

Fingerprinting "is a fact of life in many high-security occupations," said Coeur d'Alene School Board Chairman Vern Newby. "Kids are more important than any commodity we might have, if you want to look at them that way."

The proposed law from state Superintendent Anne Fox would make every applicant for a teaching certificate agree to, and pay for, a background check. The information would be kept on file at the state Department of Education.

Newby and Burchell said a simpler law could accomplish what they want.

"They could at least allow individual school districts to choose to do a complete background check," said Newby.

Burchell is lobbying legislators to propose a bill with the sole purpose of enabling individual districts to gain access to the FBI database. Since Coeur d'Alene started its background checks, about four other school districts have followed suit.

As a whole, teachers in Coeur d'Alene do not object to background checks, said Gretta Shay, president of the Coeur d'Alene Education Association.

"We want to protect our children like everyone else in the community," she said. "If we're going to do it, we might as well do it and do it thoroughly."

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