An elementary school principal in West Virginia raped and murdered a 12-year-old boy named Jeremy Bell in his cabin in 1997. It was the culmination of a four-decade teaching career that gave the prolific pedophile access to blond-haired children.
And it was avoidable. Pennsylvania school officials, warned that they had a predator on their hands, got rid of him by writing a letter of recommendation that helped the man get a job in another state.
“That was really the original impetus for me to get involved in this,” Sen. Pat Toomey told the Washington Examiner. Last week, the Pennsylvania Republican introduced the “Protecting Our Service Members’ Children from Sexual and Violent Predators Act,” a bill that would require schools that receive funding from the Defense Department to conduct periodic criminal background checks on every school employee or contractor who might have unsupervised access to children.
Toomey wants the rule to eventually cover schools nationwide, but is starting with schools that have large populations of military kids to sidestep conservative accusations of government overreach. Those schools, which receive extra funding from the Defense Department, “have an even stronger nexus” to the federal government than most public schools.
The bill would require school officials to review multiple federal and state databases during the background check. “If you’re only looking at your own state’s database, you obviously would miss a criminal conviction of someone if it occurred in a different state,” Toomey said.
Just under 500 school employees were arrested for sexual misconduct with students in 2015. A federal audit suggests that most of the abusers target dozens of children. “One series of studies found that 232 child molesters admitted to molesting a total of 17,000 victims,” according to a 2010 report from the Government Accountability Office.
Parents want to “set the Capitol on fire” when they hear of lawmakers voting against legislation that cracks down on such offenders, according to a Toomey aide. But the Pennsylvania lawmaker has been forced to make incremental progress on a broader package of reforms that he proposed during the last Congress, in conjunction with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. The lawmakers’ original bill would have barred schools from helping a suspected pedophile get a job in another school district, a practice known as “passing the trash.” It would also have instituted a nationwide background check policy.
Although the “passing the trash” ban passed into law last year, the background check provision was stymied by a coalition of liberals and conservatives. Teachers’ unions and legal rights groups argued that people who have served their time in prison shouldn’t be “unnecessarily subjected to additional punishment” by being barred from working in schools after their release.
“Research shows that the re-offending risk of people with prior convictions declines as their ‘time clean’ increases,” several unions and left-leaning activist groups wrote in a letter last year. Conservatives skeptical of federal government control over local schools hesitated to use the threat of funding cuts to implement policy changes. It didn’t help that Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander, who chaired the committee with jurisdiction over Toomey’s bill, was working simultaneously to end the Common Core curriculum standards that so many Republicans have derided as federal overreach.
Toomey has little respect for the liberal argument. “They’re just all about protecting their members,” he said of the teachers’ unions.
But he is sympathetic to the concern regarding expanding federal control over local schools. “When it comes to things like curriculum and class size and teacher evaluations, I completely agree,” he said. “I completely agree and I think there is a very good reason, and that is parents in different parts of the country could have very different priorities and ideas about what ought to be in the curriculum and what the class sizes ought to be, and other aspects.”
Toomey won’t have to worry about Alexander blocking the bill, because the new legislation will go through the Armed Services Committee, where it has an ally in Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz.
The end-game hasn’t changed, though. Once Pentagon-funded schools — which cover about 17 percent of American students, Toomey’s team said — have implemented the background check policy, he thinks it will be easier to push the national policy.
“My preference is to have a universal standard that would ensure that we are doing everything that we can to keep the school environment as safe as possible for kids,” Toomey said. “I just don’t think that there is any legitimate argument that some kids should be safe and other kids should be less safe from predators.”
