In 1997, West Virginia fifth-grade student Jeremy Bell died of what was believed to be a head injury while on a camping trip with the principal of his school, Edgar Friedrichs Jr.
Nearly eight years later, investigators determined it was not a head injury. Bell had been sexually abused and killed by his principal, according to state criminal records and documents filed in a subsequent federal lawsuit.
Probing deeper, officials realized Friedrichs had been dismissed by a Pennsylvania school for sexual misconduct allegations years earlier, but the school helped him get his job in West Virginia.
The story of Jeremy Bell, and others like it, helped provide the impetus for federal changes proposed over the past decade that would mandate background checks for teachers, require states and districts to share data about disciplined teachers and prohibit school districts from facilitating the transfer of a teacher accused of sexual misconduct to another jurisdiction.
Among the proposals have been efforts to require that names of teachers disciplined for sexual misconduct be reliably and consistently submitted to a national, government-run database, and to make the information more readily available to the public.
Many states’ discipline records are not online. Those that are can be difficult to find, hard to search and lead to incomplete or redacted documentation obscuring what the teacher did.
A bill first introduced by former Florida Congressman Adam Putnam in 2007 would have required the U.S. Department of Education to develop a database of teachers found to have engaged in sexual misconduct and make that information available to the public.
“Without adopting systematic policies and procedures at the national level,” Putnam said of this Student Protection Act in a 2009 speech, “all states remain vulnerable when hiring school employees from states with mediocre reporting procedures and lackluster reporting standards.”
“Our classrooms deserve much more than a piecemeal effort that leaves our nation’s schools exposed to predators moving from state to state,” Putnam told colleagues in a floor speech in Congress in 2009.
Putnam's legislation failed to gain traction, but advocacy and education policy groups have continued to push for a more reliable way to share information between states.
Terri Miller, president of the advocacy group Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct & Exploitation, said there should be a federal requirement that states report teacher misconduct into an official, national database.
Children are mandated to attend school, she said. “We want to make sure that the federal government is doing everything they can to make sure that our children are being protected while they’re in these schools.”
More recently, the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act was championed by U.S. Sens. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. It included provisions that would require states to conduct background checks on school employees and prohibit school officials from facilitating the transfer of teachers accused of sexual misconduct to a new district
Concerns by anti-federalist lawmakers have prevented the legislation from moving forward. Opponents included Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., who said during floor debate in April 2014 that he opposed the bill because responsibility for checking the backgrounds of teachers should be local.
“If we want safe schools, that is the job of parents, communities, school boards and states,” Alexander said. “It is not a duty to be bucked upstairs to the Senate and the Department of Education.”
Despite the opposition, half of the bill — a provision to prohibit states from transferring teachers accused of misconduct from one jurisdiction to another — was enacted as an amendment to the Every Student Achieves Act in December 2015.
Toomey said he will continue to push for a federal measure requiring states to conduct criminal background checks on teachers.
“Tell me where in America parents don’t want their kids to be safe from sexual predators,” he said. “There is no argument that some school districts should be safe and other kids should be at risk to physical harm.”
A closer look at the National Association of State Departments of Teacher Education and Certification (NASDTEC)
Founded: 1928
Location: Scottsville, Kentucky
Members: Educator credentialing agencies in all 50 states, and some U.S. territories, Canadian provinces and foreign jurisdictions.
Membership fees: $4,000 annually
Annual expenses: $353,370 (according to 2014 U.S. tax return)
Purpose: NASDTEC is a non-profit organization which promotes high standards for educators, teacher mobility across state lines and comprehensive personnel screening, according to its website. It operates the NASDTEC Clearinghouse, the nation’s only centralized database of disciplined educators.
How the NASDTEC Clearinghouse works:
- Member states report basic information on teacher discipline to the NASDTEC Clearinghouse including the educator’s name, date of birth.
- The database does not include the severity of disciplinary action, or the reason the discipline was imposed.
- Each state has its own policies and practices regarding which disciplinary actions should be submitted to the database and when.
- Monthly, NASDTEC organizes the disciplinary records it receives into a report that it distributes to members.
- When a state credentialing agency finds a match, it must contact the state which imposed the discipline in order to find details on the action.
