Schools to take fingerprints, keep 'forever'

Schools to take fingerprints, keep 'forever'
Law enforcement threw out countless employee records

When the state legislature passed a law making school employees get fingerprinted, they forgot to include one thing in it - require the records be kept.

For more than a decade, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which collected the fingerprints and compared them to criminal databases, threw out countless school employee fingerprints.

Without them, school districts and law enforcement agencies found it hard to determine whether employees had been arrested after they were hired.

The legislature has since required districts to recheck employees and wants FDLE to maintain the records and alert districts if employees get into trouble, but the extra layer of security is expected to cost the Palm Beach County School District about $1 million during the next two years.

Police staff have fanned out across the district with their fingerprint scanners to collect prints at schools. So far, they have collected about 13,000 fingerprints and expect they need to get an additional 9,000 by the law's 2009 deadline.

Although the district is paying for prints of veteran employees, thousands of substitute teachers are on their own.

Even veteran substitutes who have already undergone and paid for fingerprints have to cough up an additional $37 per print to pay for staff time, supplies and the technology used to get the print.

The total price tag is $84 - more than a day's pay.

School board member Bob Kanjian, who has heard from a veteran substitute who plans to work exclusively in private schools because of the fingerprinting expense, wants the district to look into paying for the recheck.

"We shouldn't put hurdles in front of them," Kanjian said. "We have to do it and it's good thing to have to do, but a day's pay? It doesn't make sense."

During a school board meeting last week, Kanjian said the district should pick up the fingerprinting cost after a substitute has worked in a school for a certain number of days. The district's chief operating officer is considering Kanjian's recommendation, he said.

School board member Paulette Burdick also agrees that the district needs to defray the costs of the recheck in order to keep them.

"That's a very good compromise to a difficult situation and an expensive situation," she said. "Otherwise, we might lose some, and as you know, we are in desperate need of substitute teachers."