Gov. Jay Nixon signed a bill designed to protect students from sexual misconduct by educators, and it tightens criminal background-check requirements for school bus drivers.
The law prohibits educators from establishing personal relationships with students on social networking sites such as Facebook or YouTube.The bill is believed to be the first in the nation that addresses the phenomena of children falling prey to online sexual predators.
Section 168.133 of Senate Bill 54 , the “Amy Hestir Student Protection Act” named for an adult woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by a junior high teacher three decades ago, makes school districts responsible for conducting the criminal background check on bus drivers they employ. A school district’s criminal background check on school employees must include a search of publicly available information in an electronic format that displays information through a public index or single case display.
For drivers employed by school bus contractors the criminal background check, which has been in place for years, must be conducted through the Highway Patrol’s criminal record review and must conform to the requirements of the National Child Protection Act of 1993, as amended by the Volunteers for Children Act.
This act also reduces, from two to one, the number of sets of fingerprints an applicant must submit for a criminal history background check. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education must facilitate an annual check for employees with active teaching certificates against criminal history records in the central repository, sexual offender registry, and child abuse central registry.
Under the provisions of the law the Missouri Highway Patrol is required to provide ongoing electronic updates to criminal history background checks for those persons previously submitted by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
“One of the things the bill does is in the past the bus contractor could not get the information from the highway patrol, it only went to the school district. This bill changes that,” said Dr. Roger Dorson, the coordinator or school administrative services at the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. “It allows school bus cnotractors to request and receive those bg check reports.”
School districts may conduct criminal background check and fingerprint collection for newly hired employees at their own expense.
