Thread: Schools battling illegal workers

Schools battling illegal workers
District officials cite changes to Jessica Lunsford Act
June 7, 2008 - 10:15PM
By S. Brady Calhoun
News Herald Writer
Last month, a Bay County sheriff's deputy discovered several "undocumented workers" at Hutchison Beach Elementary School.
They were part of a crew building a new cafeteria, a new addition to the administration building and new classrooms and performing other site work.

Under Florida's Jessica Lunsford Act, construction workers are required to undergo a thorough background screening and sexual predator check before they walk onto school property. Under the law, prompted by the abduction and murder of a Central Florida girl, screenings should prevent undocumented workers from stepping foot onto a Florida school campus.

But changes in the law and the actions of some contractors have led to the continual appearance of unscreened workers on local campuses, school officials say.


The problem

The contract between every construction company and Bay District Schools states all personnel on school grounds must submit to the screenings required under the Jessica Lunsford Act. The wording indicates employers can do their own screenings or send the employees to district offices. According to district officials, though some contractors insist every employee working on a school campus undergoes both a sexual predator check and a background check, others try to skirt the law.

Mike Jones, the district's safety and security manager, does his own sweeps of local schools to make sure workers have the proper credentials and have undergone screenings. On two recent occasions, several workers fled the job site when he arrived. In other incidents, Jones forced workers to leave because they and their bosses had not followed the law.
"It's causing us a problem now," Jones said.

And it has been a problem for a several years. In 2006, Jones initiated an investigation into nine illegal immigrants who attempted to do construction work for the school system. In 2007, Florida's auditor general found district officials did not provide background checks and fingerprints for eight workers with direct student contact. The same problem was highlighted in the 2006 audit.

District officials said the problem has been heightened by two changes to the Lunsford Act in 2007: Although every worker still is supposed to undergo a sexual predator screening, workers do not have to go through the more rigorous background check if they work behind a barrier, such as a wall, separating them from children, or if they stay within the line of sight of a supervisor who has passed the necessary background check.

"I said, ‘This ain't going to work,'" Jones said of the line-of-sight exemption. "And it's not."

Jones and other district officials said the measure has made it harder for district employees to determine who is allowed on a campus and who is not. Before the changes, every construction worker went through the background check and was issued a badge. Now, supervisors just hand in the names, Social Security numbers and other information about their employees, and the employees do not receive badges.

That means if Jones or another district officials wants to check credentials, he has to stop the construction work and do what amounts to a roll call.

Still, Superintendent James McCalister said employees are working to ensure only people who have been screened properly are on local campuses.

"We just don't want them around students," he added. "We have people who are supposed to be checking those on a daily basis."

Any contractor who continually violates the Lunsford Act will be banned from bidding on future contracts, McCalister added. However, so far no contractor has been reprimanded over the issue, he said.





http://www.newsherald.com/news/workers_ ... trict.html

Failure to do background checks is a form of child endangerment and the companies should be charged and prosecuted. It's a crime of omission.