To Volunteer, All You Have to do Is…

I wonder what the process here in Jersey would be and how similar it is to what I had to go through to purchase a firearm, probably more stringent and what it takes to get a FPID here in Jersey is ridiculous.

Ok so until the boy is actually *IN* school I won’t be able to find out. I was on the school’s webiste and that info seems to be on the PTA page in the Parent Portal, oh well, what’s waiting one more year…

Wow! That is crazy!

In Arizona there is nothing like this, and I’ve volunteered a lot at a lot of schools and never had to fill out anything. Any when I was president of the elementary school PTA, we were desperate for volunteers of any kind. I can only imagine that this would greatly reduce the number of people who are willing to volunteer at a school… and they are already few enough!

In addition to the background checks, I had to go to a 3-hour training class about spotting and reporting abuse. And for one of the programs I volunteer for, I had another training course and paperwork for being a state-mandated reporter of abuse.

Did the police check for coaching, but made it clear to the town, that I wasn’t doing separate ones for each sport. If they started adding the rest of that crap there would be no coaches. We have told them that we would all quit.
As for the school, never jumped through the hoops. They needed me, and that was it.

“If I were to also have volunteered for the children’s ministries we wouldn’t have been able to serve in the same room together.”

Wait, what? I can’t get my head around this….what do they think you’ll do as a couple that you *won’t* do singly?

I needed to do less to be licensed by the state to practice law. And that provides an income as a result. No way that I would do all that to volunteer at my child’s school.

We just have to show up to volunteer at my school. No background checks at all . And our school doesn’t just recruit volunteers from parents. A couple times a year (mostly for the book fairs) emails go out to the local community listservs asking citizens to volunteer at their neighborhood school. This year we were checked out at the book fair by the former mayor who doesn’t have a child or grandchild in our school, but does live in the neighborhood. They don’t have to get background checks either. The one exception is the mentoring program and that makes some sense since it does involve a long-term, one-on-one relationship with an at-risk child (the ones most likely to be preyed upon).

The only way this kind of crazy, intrusive and humiliating (yes, humiliating!) garbage will stop is to refuse to participate. Volunteers have a choice of whether or not be agree to be fingerprinted and investigated and we can say no.
Oh, but then the children can’t on go fields trips or play T-ball! Maybe at first they can’t, but if enough people refuse to give in, eventually the rules will change and volunteers will stop being treated like suspected child molesters.
I refused to have a background check when I volunteered to work with the homeless. Not that I’m wanted by Interpol or anything, but I dislike cooperating with useless bureaucracy for no good reason. They took me on anyway after trying and failing to get me to change my mind. The moral is, if they’re desperate enough for volunteers they’ll forgo the red tape.
I have a suspicion that some of this background checking is farmed out to private companies that profit from stranger danger hysteria and that market their services to school districts and organizers of kids’ sports teams on the grounds that the world is simply seething with predators who can’t wait to get their hands on little Jaxxon and Madison while in the guise of coaching them at soccer.
This nonsense has got to stop but it won’t stop until we refuse to cooperate.

I teach music to the kids at church during faith formation. I’ve been told I have to do many of these same background checks, and to date I haven’t done them. I am strongly conflicted on what I’d do if they tell me I can’t volunteer unless I do.

If I didn’t have to do it to have and parent my own kids, I’m sure not doing all that just to VOLUNTEER.

I need to start investing a background check companies. Or maybe start one, because obviously someone’s making a lot of money. Yep,it happened again. And again. And again. Three ludicrious, ridiculous background check stories from the last month. First, for an event my children’s elementary school is doing, the person in charge sent out an email saying that the school secretary had said that “technically, all visitors to the school [on the day of the event], need to have a background check.” Really? ALL visitors? I called the school for clarification, and, as I had guessed, the secretary who had said that, backed down quickly when I questioned her. Turns out it’s only volunteers who need checks, not everyone. But jeez louise, can you imagine? If EVERYONE who stepped foot on a school in our district needed a background check? Every fan at a football game, every talent show audience member, every parent coming in for parent-teacher conferences…. Absolutely ridiculous! And, while I was quite sure that the secretary had it wrong, and that the district hadn’t become that draconian, why was no one else questioning this? Why wasn’t the secretary questioning that????

OK, second situation: My son and husband attended a boy scout meeting this week for the first time ever. Rule here is that a parent has to accompany the child to every scout meeting—I guess they don’t want the leaders to have to deal with a bunchy of unaccompanied boys who they can’t control while they’re teaching leadership, responsibility. And then the parents were told that they all had to get a background check. So, I guess that leads to the question—if a child has parents who in fact have criminal backgrounds, the exact child who could probably use a good program like Boy Scouts more than just about anyone, can that child not attend?

And then just today, my husband found out that the soccer team he coaches for our 6 year old son, ALL volunteers need to be registered and have a background check. Not just the main coaches (because, you know, coaching a team of 6 year olds, with their parents watching from just yards a way in a field with several other teams on it too, is the PERFECT place to commit a crime!), but ANYONE who volunteers in ANY capacity! He asked what was the criteria and was told, “anyone who has a roster of the team players.” Yes, a roster. Because that list of 12 boys with their parents names, phone and email addresses.

I will say that requirements for that volunteer in PA, shown in the original post, is WAY over the top. I would organized a protest.

In 1984, I first volunteered for Big Brothers. The screening process was extremely extensive. I was fingerprinted and given a background check. I then had to be interviewed by a board of people from the community who asked me all kinds of very personal questions about my sex life. Now I understand that there has to be some screening process for potential Big Brother/Big Sister volunteers but that was ridiculous. The counselor then asked me if I ever heard of NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association). It was a fairly new organization back then and I informed him that I had heard of it. Well, right then and there, all the red flags went up. “You mean, you are familiar with this organization?” he asked me with eyebrows raised as if being familiar with this organization meant that I was a charter member. He then asked me the dumbest question of all time. “So what do you think of it?” I then answered his question with an equally dumb question of my own. “Well, what do YOU think of bank robbing sir?” I THINK he got my drift!

I’d be interested in know if all of these background checks have resulted in fewer cases of abuse in schools. Because, schools have been doing background checks on teachers for decades now, and it seems like every week we see 2-3 stories, just in our state, of teachers arrested for sex crimes involving students. Most often it’s high school teachers in their 20s having relationships with underage students. I know these things happened in the past, but I don’t remember them happening with anything near the frequency they now seem to. Background checks are not stopping these situations.

It also seems like most of the time when these situations do occur, it’s outside of the actual formal school/sport/church setting. Many of these teacher scandals seem to involve outside-of-school contact and lots of online/text interactions. The Jerry Sandusky case involved him having these teens over to his home frequently. Many of the church cases I’ve seen involve informal small groups where an older child is left alone with a group of younger children, again in a home. I think background checks can create a false sense of security so that parents don’t see read flags. “There can’t be anything wrong with this hot 23 year old teacher texting my 15 year old son at all hours of the night and taking him to heavy metal concerts: after all, she passed a background check!” “There’s no questions to be asked about why my daughter’s track coach invites her over to his house two or three times a week–he isn’t a sex offender, so he must be safe!”

Most schools, day cares, churches, etc. have policies in place that are so stringent that even if a known child molester were to volunteer, they would have no opportunity to harm a child. At my church (which does also do background checks for those who work with children), the nursery policy is that at least two adults–and often it’s three adults and a teen volunteer or two–must be present at all times, and if a child needs to use the bathroom, the parent is paged to bring them. Adults are NEVER to be alone with children, at any point. That’s the norm at every church I’ve attended, and when I was helping a friend develop a children’s program at a church she was starting, I learned that was actually very common practice. Many day care centers (especially if they are not a home day care) and preschools and public schools have similar policies: you will never have an adult alone with a child. So children are actually very safe in these settings, because there is little to no opportunity for abuse, which makes these kind of extensive background checks seem even more ridiculous.

But, I think we fundamentally misunderstand what most sexual abuse that takes place in these sorts of settings looks like. We think it’s the Little League coach who abuses 8 year olds during practice, or the church nursery worker who abuses 3 year olds in the bathroom, but while cases like that do sometimes happen, they are very rare. Much more common is the female high school assistant basketball coach who spends a lot of time with one of the guys on the team outside of practice and school and they end up partying together and then sleeping together, or the twenty-something youth pastor who starts texting a teen member of the youth group outside of meetings and soon they are having a relationship they absolutely should not be having. Like most sex crimes, these types of abuse are much more likely to be non-forcible statutory offenses than the serial molestation of prepubescent children. And, again, background checks will not work because many of the offenders in these cases are themselves pretty young and do not have a criminal history and give a false sense of security so that parents don’t question interactions that they probably should question.

Also, one year my son attended an inner-city charter school. The school could not get enough volunteers–not even close–because many of the parents (I’d say probably the majority) were either undocumented or had a criminal record. So you end up with the schools that could most use volunteers and the kids who could most use parental involvement unable to do so because parents don’t want to open themselves up to the humiliation and potentially even legal consequences (for those who are undocumented) that a background check might lead to.

I think a lot of our policies about things like day cares and church nurseries are still based on the Satanic abuse hysteria of the 80s/90s. Nevermind that not a single case turned out to be true, we’re still acting as if Satanic child pornography ringleaders cannot wait to infiltrate our nurseries and kindergartens.

I absolutely stopped volunteering at school when these background requirements were instituted. Both of my kids were adopted and it was bad enough being treated like a criminal during the process to adopt them; I’m not about to go through it again just to accompany them to the apple orchard or to hand out water balloons on field day.

“if a child has parents who in fact have criminal backgrounds, the exact child who could probably use a good program like Boy Scouts more than just about anyone, can that child not attend?”

Not only that, some criminal histories contain only dumb things that someone did in college, for example, or when they were young and stupid, or an OWI 5 years ago. Upstanding citizen since then, but is there a chance their kid can’t be in Scouts, have mom/dad chaperone a field trip? Are they just looking for crimes against kids? Does anyone even ever know what the criteria is for disallowing a classroom volunteer?

Good point by the person who said none of us had to go through all this to have and parent our own kids!

This is a sensitive issue for me. I am a practicing Roman Catholic, and it is difficult to speak up about this taboo issue in a Church so deeply and genuinely wounded by it. I’m convinced that Catholics mostly go through the rigmarole of Safe Environment training and background checks as a gesture to help restore much-needed trust.

I’m glad that people volunteering with children are learning to recognize and report child abuse. But in truth, I worry that all of this red tape is creating an irrational sense of fear and false sense of security.
Think about it. Background checks on those abusive priests would have come out clean. Fingerprinting helps catch robbers, not prevent child abuse. And it’s naïve to believe that those 1990s video documentaries shown during Safe Environment trainings would have stopped the priests from sexually abusing children. You can’t training-session your way out of pedophilia and institutional corruption.

There’s a lack of volunteers in the church nursery. I’d love to step up and help. But with my husband’s work schedule and no childcare for *my own* kids, I’m unable to attend the three-hour trainings. Never mind that I am already a licensed social worker and mandated reporter. Never mind that I already attended the training, but it was in another state and therefore “doesn’t count.” Never mind that I already attended the training, but they want you to do it yearly.

So when I get frantic emails from volunteers needing someone to fill in for them, I have to tell them that my hands are tied. I’m unable to volunteer in a parish desperate for volunteers. Meanwhile, there are 2-3 volunteers in the nursery during a one-hour Mass, and there are already prohibitions about taking children to the bathroom or going anywhere alone with them. Abuse would be really hard to pull off in these circumstances. Also, the minors who volunteer don’t even have to go through the training.

I don’t have easy answers. But I also don’t think we’re effectively repairing the damage.

I have had to go through a lot of rigamarole to volunteer at my kids school and I hated it. That said, I wanted to let you know of a cautionary tale that happened several years ago when one of my children was in 2nd grade. She wanted to be in Girl scouts and a school mom I knew volunteered to be the scout mom for her school. I went to the first meeting for parents and all was well, although it was weird that the scout mom’s husband seem to be very involved and I thought that was weird. I was not in scouts myself and I just chalked it up to an over-involved parent.

A few days later I was doing some legal work in my job and I have to sift through arrest records. The husband and scout “father” was arrested the previous week for soliciting a young prostitute. Mmm, I wondered, how did he pass the background check I wondered? It turned out the background check had been done previously to the arrest.

I went to next meeting and there he was again and the couple talked about an overnight trip. Of course I took my daughter out and informed the group head, who was horrified.

It seems like everything I’m involved with is part of the background check mania. Except my kid’s school (so far but I’m sure that’s subject to change) when they attended public school they used a background check but the private one so far is not using them although they did install a security door this spring, sadly. I continue to volunteer because I know how hard it is to get volunteers (even if they didn’t have to jump through so many hoops) and a lot of the programs and other things the kids are involved with run because of volunteers. What I think is really ridiculous is that thought that a background check will eliminate every many poeple. I would love to know how much volunteerism has decreased due to these checks but when I tried to glean this information a couple of years ago I had a hard time getting responses.

“I will say that requirements for that volunteer in PA, shown in the original post, is WAY over the top. I would organized a protest.”

What do you have to hide?

What are the odds that is the reaction from any and everyone if you tell them you do not want to do it.

“To volunteer at the HIGH SCHOOL in Southern California, I had to:
-show a negative TB test (must redo every three years)
-fingerprint scan (I’m guessing it was a criminal check)
-drug test (submit a urine sample)
-provide personal references
-half a day of time to go to the school district office, county ed office, med. office for the urine sample (with a 2 hour wait), not counting the TB test, which requires two visits over what, 3 days?
-pay $75 for some of the tests (which supposedly could be reimbursed, but I felt like the school was poor enough, so I just paid it).

For volunteer positions related to the school I’ve also had to:
-get a livescan (separate fingerprint scan for each volunteer position, about $25 a pop)
-attend annual child abuse prevention/detection training
-provide insurance information on my car (with less than minimal liability coverage)”

bul!@#$

Don’t really understand why women have to go through the check. Talked to a security firm manager once and he said that 99 percent of the people who “fail” are men.

But what I’m asking Warren is this: Say I had an arrest and conviction for marijuana possession in college. 10 years later, I’d like to volunteer at my daughter’s school, and I’d like to know if that conviction would eliminate me from volunteer consideration, even though I’ve been 10 years crime-free (yay? lol) I’d like to know if the background checks are only to eliminate people who’ve committed crimes against children, or any crime anywhere ever.

I don’t volunteer, for these reasons. It’s ridiculous.

I also had a run-in with the school over their stupid policy about giving away the kids’ whereabouts. When I had to be at work at 6 am, I had to leave before the kids left for school. I called the school to make sure the kids had not been tardy. (They will refuse to let the kids enter the school unless a parent signs them in, meaning my kids would be locked out of the house for the entire day, as my husband leaves for work as soon as they leave. If they were tardy, I would have needed to high-tail it home to get them in school). The school refused to tell me if they were even there. I pointed out their stupid policy doesn’t make kids any safer. The lady argued with me, but I won- I pointed out the truancy phone call doesn’t go out to parents until 6 pm that day. In the meantime, a potential kidnapper has had upwards of 11 hours to take off with the kids. I told her their policy was security theater. She hung up on me, however, now the phone calls will go out at 8 am for the upcoming school year. However our sons are going to a charter school next year.

Is this really the Free Range Kids website?

I see far too many parents willing to jump through the hoops

…to volunteer….

jump through hoops to give of their time for free.

Could it be that these parents feel guilty not spending enough time with their kids at home? Or do they just have an Unnatural Attachment to their little ones? In reality, I think it’s too easy to cave and just go along.

Until The Majority of parents “Just say no” to background checks – this will only get worse.

Lenore, perhaps, like your call for parents to take their children to the park and leave them there, you should call for a MONTH of NO VOLUNTEERING to protest this. But you probably wouldn’t do that because everyone would say you wanted to let perverts into the schools.

But, you know. I don’t think you’d get many parents to protest because they wouldn’t want to be seen as going against the majority.

We enrolled our kids in a public school for awhile and I was very eager to be involved… at first. On “Meet the Teacher” day there were forms in every room for potential “Room Parents” to fill out, so of course I picked one up, until I realised the entire form consisted of consent for checks of all sorts that the volunteers were required to pay for.

Granted, the over all cost wasn’t THAT much and if I were determined, we could have managed it. But I live in a small, mostly low income town. I can’t imagine how many parents WANTED to be involved and help out at the school but would have been unable to due to the sheer cost of it.

On top of that I was angry that it was being done at all. The kids only stayed in that school for two weeks, but it was long enough for me to get the impression, similar to what Beanie said, that parents are very unwelcome in the school and they really don’t WANT us there. I’m sure the teachers do, because every one of them pushed the volunteer forms at us, but the administration, based on every policy, really doesn’t.

That’s unreal. And the thing is, with AEC assault registries, the known criminals are, well known. Don’t exactly need a check. And there is no teat for the havent been caught ye . And it sounds like it will exclude others. If this was the full requirements in Canada I wouldn’t pass cuz my protest history would show up in a cisis check (Canadian FBI/CIA in one). I’d be very dangerous, might in site care if the environment or human rights.

These rules really limit volunteerism.

Working parents who may have time to volunteer 1 day a year aren’t going to do it.

Working parents who may have more time, say 4 days a year, are losing 2-3 of those days filing out paperwork. Once again, not worth it.

Stay-at-home parents who have the time to volunteer frequently may not have the money to pay for all the fees.

So your only hope is to have a stay-at-home parent from a fairly affluent family, who actually wants to volunteer.

It’s discriminatory in so many ways, and is unlikely to make even one child safer in any given year.

@Asparagus Freak,

Wow.
Accompanied boy scouts? That blows me away.
The only organization I ever joined – in my entire life.
All on my own. Which is what sealed the deal. (With parental permission, of course.)

But this all raises fascinating questions. Just how are people credentialized anyway? Within any community, and for what purposes? As if anything volunteered by anybody, for free, automatically raises the following questions:
Who are you, really? And why are you really here?
We either have assumptions of innocence – or assumptions of guilt. There are no hung juries in the picture.
(And the judge apparently, is taking a nap.)
By our actions, we are known.
(And, last time I checked…….trusted.)
I kinda like how that works.
Bogus bonafides work for Confidence Men, I suppose………..
But – volunteers?
Since when should it be easier to break into Fort Knox (for whatever is rumored to be in there) than to set a foot inside a neighborhood school?

My credentials presented to enter those hallowed halls used to be the smile on my face and the tunes in my teeth. (And the kids all loved it, when I sat on the edge of the teacher’s desk.)
I got into big trouble for going 5 minutes overtime. (But, that was for the autograph signing.)
But who was I, really? The Man from Glad……………….(or, the Dad from Glad……or a Doodad, actually)
but whatever I was – was something that just never was defined down to a perfectly precise known object.
Yet the kids themselves – always knew anyway.

@Jill,

Yes, I can well imagine it’s an industry unto itself. Profit marginalizing the rest of us into lucrative commodities.

“But what I’m asking Warren is this: Say I had an arrest and conviction for marijuana possession in college. 10 years later, I’d like to volunteer at my daughter’s school, and I’d like to know if that conviction would eliminate me from volunteer consideration, even though I’ve been 10 years crime-free (yay? lol) I’d like to know if the background checks are only to eliminate people who’ve committed crimes against children, or any crime anywhere ever.”

The answer, of course, is “it depends”. Different groups have different things they’re looking for, and sometimes their requirements change (if they have plenty of volunteers, they can be more choosy, if they’re desperately under-subscribed, anyone not facing a current prosecution might be acceptable.)

My brush with this came from FIRST Lego League, where I’d been a volunteer for over a decade; last year they had mandatory background checks for the first time. It wasn’t a big deal to do it (maybe 20 minutes of time) but because it was new, I’m sure the volunteer coordinators had a lot of trouble getting people to do it (since they have a LOT of repeat volunteers, and in the past, the volunteer process was more like “sure, I’ll do (assignment) again this year.”

Some of the local schools have or at least have had a “community service” requirement for graduation, and FLL tournaments were popular with the high-school students who needed to log some community-service hours. (Working at a robotics tournament is way better than roadside beautification). I wonder what happens if one of those kids fails a background check, and thus is unable to volunteer, and thus is ineligible for a HS diploma?

…And then the schools complain that they don’t have any volunteers.

This seems like a “rich people’s problems” kind of thing. My daughter went to an elementary school that had a huge population of underprivileged kids. Most of her classmates had at least one parent in jail, strung out on drugs, or the child was being raised by elderly grandparents. Either that, or the parents were recent immigrants who spoke no English at all.

I volunteered every chance I could, and I was never asked for a background check. The school had a policy of needing it done, but they never enforced it because they knew darn well that hardly anyone would pass, and they needed all the help they could get.

I am unable to volunteer at my kids’ school because I was an idiotic young adult and was arrested for driving an unregistered car. I have a record, and although the intervening 25 years have been without even a parking ticket, I can’t help in the classroom, do lunch duty, go on field trips. I had to fight two appeals to be allowed to attend school plays. All because of a misdemeanor. What I did was wrong, I don’t contest that. But I feel this is a bit overboard. I was able to get licensed to serve as a foster parent despite this (they saw it for what it was: a teenaged mistake), yet the school is inflexible. I am not the dangerous element they are looking for.

I suspect I’d pass all the checks. I’ve never abused or been accused of any crime (child related or otherwise). However, I don’t think I’d pass the reference check. I don’t know a lot of people. I can count my friends on one hand and have fingers left over.

Another point, I tried to join BB/BS when I was 24 (20 years or so ago) I was turned down for some reason. As I said, I’ve never committed a crime or been accused of it. All I can figure out is that I failed the MMPI (a personality test that I don’t believe is accurate) or one of my references decided that I shouldn’t help a kid and it might cause me to not find a proper girlfriend (I later learned that one of the references didn’t think it was normal that a 24yo single man would want a little brother.) Also, another reference was my girlfriend’s mother…so I have no idea what she said.

Anyway, my point is that all the background checks in the world won’t protect against a clever enough pervert, and it might just prevent well-meaning introverts from helping. I don’t have any kids and my ex-gf’s kids are all grown, but I miss helping out little-league, boy scouts, and other means. I’d love to volunteer for youth events, being around youngsters really seems to make me feel a decade or more younger. However, single adult males would probably be investigated just for asking. So, I’ll sit frustrated and pray I meet someone and have a passle of my own. (at 40-something, it’s not likely…but it could happen)

“While is it a small percentage of the population (can’t remember exactly, but between 5-10%) is criminal.
Criminals think differently than the rest of us and we have to remember that. We don’t keep our kids inside because of this criminal element but we also let them know what to do if they unfortunately encounter it. We don’t pretend it doesn’t exist, or act as if EVERYBODY is a criminal. Balance.”

I don’t know where you got this information, but in general there is not some group of people who are “criminals” and other people who are not. While I have yet to be able to find solid statistics about how many Americans have a criminal record, it’s high. I know one study found that 40% of men and 20% of women are arrested by age 23. 68 million Americans–about 25% of people–have a criminal record in this country. And, that’s not at all gender-balanced, so it’s very likely that well over a third of men have a criminal record.

This is because most “criminals” are not people “who think differently than the rest of us.” They are, in fact, US. They are often people who made the same stupid mistakes the rest of us made but got caught for them whereas we didn’t. They are often people who learned from those mistakes and went on to not make them again.

I don’t doubt there is some percentage–far less than 5-10% of the population–who compulsively or continually engage in criminal behavior. However, most people with a criminal record are regular people like you or me who either got caught doing the illegal stuff that many of us also did (like using drugs, driving after drinking, getting into a fight, or committing one of the three felonies a day that one author claims we commit) or who made a really big mistake at one point in their lives but learned from it. Making a distinction between “criminals” and “the rest of us good people” is not going to get us anywhere good.

Frankly it’s absurd to believe that 40% of the population who had an arrest while young for drugs or fighting in a bar are a danger to children walking around.

“Have you ever pled guilty, been convicted or charged with any act of neglecting, abusing, injuring or molesting any child?” “If your answer to any of the above questions is ‘Yes,’ you may not serve at today’s event”

This was on the form for a district-wide event for AWANA. AWANA is a great organization that my kids are all in and we support, but when looking at volunteering for district-wide event, I found out that I was prohibited because CPS decided to investigate us a couple years back.

Nevermind that the D.A. finally came around and withdrew the case. Guilty forever because accused once.

This won’t stop me from supporting AWANA, but it was disturbing and insulting. I wonder how many reasonable, wonderful parents are prohibited from working with their own and other children because of prohibitions like this.

Most sex offenders do not re-offend, and many are even innocent of any kind of contact offense. Background checks may make paranoid indiviuals feel better, since there is no known cure for sex paranoia and sex hysteria.

“I don’t know where you got this information, but in general there is not some group of people who are “criminals” and other people who are not.”

There absolutely is. The vast majority of crime in this country is committed by a small handful of people. Yes, anyone can commit a one-off crime and many do, mostly in their youth. However, the vast majority of my clients are frequent fliers. They are in court over and over and over. This is the way they live their entire lives – in and out of the criminal justice system. They started in juvenile court and moved to adult court at 17. It is passed from generation to generation and me simultaneously representing grandfather, father and grandson is not unusual. I left the PDs office 4 years ago now. I can still walk into my old courtroom on any given court day and recognize 90% of the names on the court calendar.

“This is because most ‘criminals’ are not people ‘who think differently than the rest of us.'”

Again, they most certainly do. It is not the “criminal mind” that Sukiemom wants to make it. It is the disrupted thought processes caused by the cycle of poverty.

However, the vast majority of these criminals are not dangerous to you and I. Outside of the occasional armed robbery, mostly of stores, I have NEVER, in over 10 years as a criminal defense attorney, had a stranger-on-stranger violent crime. They happen, but not often. Even most thefts involve unoccupied buildings (closed businesses, unoccupied homes).

Poverty does not cause crime. There are plenty of poor people who are law-abiding citizens. Certainly the offspring of criminals have both biological and environmental factors that make it more likely for them to commit violent crime as well.
There is plenty of research on how brains of violent criminals are different than the average person. It’s a fact.

A whole separate issue with these checks are the folks who get weeded out. As a family lawyer I know many parents (both Moms and Dads) who have been the subject of false domestic violence allegations used to get an upper hand in custody battles. These parents have a record and can never volunteer. I also know several perfectly lovely parents who have something of a “checkered” past (petty theft when they were dumb 19 year olds for example). They are wonderful parents and would make great volunteers but they can’t because they have a record. Or, they don’t know want all the parents at the school to find out about it, so they don’t even bother.

Paperwork/background checks/FBI clearance for basic, community activism like school volunteering restricts access to schools and erodes trust in communities. Want to keep kids safe from abuse? Educate them to resist and report. Most abuse happens at home, by someone known to the child.

Strong communities, where citizens know their neighbors and children and strive to keep kids healthy and safe, prevent abuse. I have a vested interest in all of the kids and parents I’ve met and befriended in the 10 years I’ve volunteered at my children’s elementary school. I will always look out for them (and hope their families return the favor). I’ve also picked up on certain individuals that I don’t want around my children, many who would pass all of the above background checks. Paper doesn’t beat scissors. This false sense of security, as if restricting kids to only vetted adults keeps them safe from abusive family members or classmates, harms more than it helps.

I enjoy volunteering and being involved in my children’s education. But I won’t do it if I’m treated as guilty until proven Background Checked. My 10 years of service and reputation as a good parent love of our school should suffice. Actions speak louder than words. If not, it’s the school’s loss.

I had a child in middle school when we had heavy rains with high winds. School sent out an alert that parents had to pick up their kids in the car line front of the school instead of letting them walk home. Over 2000 kids went there so you can imagine how long it took. And they would only let one car load at a time. Insanity.

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I’m in Missouri. I did have to fill out a background check form to volunteer in the children’s program at church, but the church covered the cost for it. However, I think I will need to pay the cost for my background check to volunteer at my younger daughter’s school. In contrast, I can help out a lot at my teenager’s school, such as by serving a meal to the kids on the night of a play, or giving kids rides home, without needing a background check.

I also live in Pennsylvania, and the school district we now live in requires the same type of clearances. The district we lived in prior to this, about 20 minuets away did not. Our current school is always looking for parent volunteers, begging actually, while the other school had too many parents offering to help. All schools are doing is hurting their relationship with parents. Now we feel like unwanted, uninvited guests at our own children’s schools. I miss the relationship we had with the teachers before, the school staff knew the parents and our children. It was wonderful, and never once did I hear about any parent hurting a child while volunteering. One of my kids favorite events was when once every few months parents would walk freely onto the elementary school (gasp) and have lunch with their kids, now I need my drivers licence scanned if I want to get out of the office. How sad!

Sukiemom – There is a reason that 98% of those who commit crimes qualify for public defenders. Poverty and crime is very much linked. I know it is nice to think you are better than them, but it is really just a matter of circumstance.

There is a completely different mindset in those caught in the cycle of poverty (poverty passed down through generations as opposed to new poverty or chosen poverty) . An impulsivity, inability to set goals and poor decision-making ability that stem directly from life in poverty. While, yes, some manage to grow up in poverty and not exhibit these traits, most are “new” poverty – ie recent immigrants, people raised middle/working class who slip into poverty – and not those whose family has been mired in poverty for generations. It is also possible, though less likely, to grow up with these traits and not commit crimes.

I don’t doubt that the brain of criminals is different. We are talking about cause, not result.

It is just as sensible to say that poor choices can eventually lead to crime which eventually leads to poverty. When people have a rap sheet it is nearly impossible for them to support themselves legally. So if they commit another crime they need a public defender. It makes perfect sense.

I have known someone for 20 years who was an intelligent person from a solid middle-class home. He had lot of skills, including charm, and went up the ladder until he was making more than $300,000 in a telecom job. Yet he did all sorts of crooked cons on the side, eventually getting caught. Now he’s on food stamps and is using a public defender for one of his cons.

I have worked with the poor for decades and I have unfailingly been amazed at how many strong and honest people there are in the face of terrible injustices.

Do I think that they and other honest people are better than career criminals. Sure do.

This Princeton study is one of the best I’ve seen on the subject:

http://paa2011.princeton.edu/papers/111687

“…. last thing I want in my classroom is a volunteer who doesn’t understand things like student confidentiality and boundaries.”

Please tell me how on earth the background check procedure listed above in Lenore’s article, or for that matter ANY background check, magically guarantees that a person understands student confidentiality and boundaries?

Conversely, I’m at a loss to see how committing a crime in your 20’s precludes one, at the age of 38 for example, from having an understanding of student confidentiality and boundaries.

You got me.

I will admit though that sometimes that I have an issue with our school and parent’s volunteering. Some parents are there EVERY SINGLE DAY! They like hang out around the school like its their job. Its annoying. I don’t like it. They need to get a hobby. The teachers have told me they get tired of them being around that much and they agree with me it can be a violation of the student’s privacy. I don’t like random parents seeing my son getting his special accommodations or seeing him have a meltdown. That is none of their business. Especially when there is judgement going around on their part.

I am fine with parents volunteering one day a week or something, but you don’t need to be in the school that much. I feel like for one thing its not free range to be following your kid around like that everywhere. I try to give my kids space at school and only show up for class parties or field day or field trips or the occasional lunch or volunteer day. Its not every week that is for dang sure. More than maybe 2 days a month at most.

Chuck, you have a point. Since I became an adult, I’ve moved twice. I never reached out to neighbors because I didn’t like ‘bothering’ strangers in their homes. There are/were no community centers in either neighborhood and I have real trouble making friends. The only real friends I had were made at work or church, not my neighborhood.

It was easy as kids, though. Back then, we hung out with the kids in the neighborhood…in the summer playing late games. Hide -n- seek is more fun after dark. (I’m talking as 10-13yos) It was nothing for the new kid to walk up to a group of kids playing to invite himself in. There was shyness at first (even in the forthright kids), but that was soon overcome in a day.

Nowadays, a lot of parents have to meet any new kids’ parents. Investigate them by searching the web. Kids are also often over-scheduled so don’t have time to play in the neighborhood. They’re too busy at soccer, karate, or some such. You can’t make neighborhood friends if you’re never in the neighborhood.

David

Sukiemom-

Your insight is laughable. While I am sure that they exist in the systems in minuscule numbers, not a single one of my clients comes from a $300,000 upbringing. My clients’ families largely came here as slaves and they have never risen higher than that in terms of money. I can count on my fingers the ones who actually stood some chance of never going to prison. The remainder were predestined from birth. But you go on believing that it is just flawed people and not the cycle of poverty that is the problem. Apparently some like you enjoy locking up millions of people with no hope of that ever changing because you refuse to address the real issues that cause it.

There have been countless studies showing the effect of poverty on the brain. Studies that prove that it is the cycle of poverty that causes crime, not crime that causes the cycle of poverty. Studies showing the decline in thought processes after just one generation in poverty.

Yes, people manage to pull out of this cycle. We should look to them as the oddities that they are to see what it is that they had that enabled them to succeed when so many millions of other fail and how we can get that to others and not just lord it over the heads of those millions of others while insisting that they should be able to succeed just because John did and that they must be personal failures without understanding the herculean effort that it actually took for John to succeed.

You want to make all repeat criminals out to be evil, violent gangbangers. That is a very small portion of my clientele. Even the gangbangers aren’t as evil and immoral as you want to make them for the most part. Most, albeit definitely not all, are just like you and I. They love their families and want to do better. They simply have huge strikes against them in life before they ever commit their first crime. All are extremely poor – not what middle class American thinks of as poor, but actual poverty. They were raised in dysfunctional/chaotic homes. The majority are of low intelligence. Many suffer from mental illness. Many suffer from addiction issues that leads to other criminal behavior. These two groups are generally one and the same. And once they get caught up in the system, it is almost impossible for them to get out because the probation/parole/court system is set up to make poor people fail.

I did Big Sister program about 10 years ago and it was not that hard to get in. They came to the house to interview me and I think I had to provide a reference or something. It was really not that hard if I recall. I wonder if they are stricter now? I did not have to get fingerprinted or background checks or anything like that that I know of.

When I got a job as a substitute teacher and at a daycare though I was fingerprinted and had to pay for it myself for the sub job. They may have done a background check but they paid for it.

I don’t particularly like my fingerprints being in the system because normally you have to be arrested for that to happen and I have never been arrested. But whatever.

One more thing, Donna. I have been a guardian ad litem to parents that have justified to me their raping and starving their children (while they ate well) because of their poverty and upbringing. Yeah.

Makes me wonder if they have higher standards for the Big Brothers than the Big Sisters? Because I hardly had to do anything to get picked. Mostly just the interview at my home.

Anyone who visits a classroom in my child’s Pennsylvania public school during the school day needs to pass a background check. I didn’t volunteer before, but this annoyance will deter me from ever offering to volunteer in the future.

Some sports organizations are also taking this to extremes. Volunteers for ice hockey penalty box duty must now pass background checks for the program my daughter is in.

Yes, there is fear that a parent might molest someone’s daughter in a hockey penalty box… during a game.

Someone on penalty box duty just has to open and close the penalty box door. That’s it.