It shouldn’t be too much to ask the Colorado Department of Education to follow a law meant to protect school children from criminals and sex offenders.
But instead the department has been breaking that law the last couple of years — and it needs to stop.
The General Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill in 2008 that requires the CDE to notify school districts when a teacher is arrested. It’s a simple, straightforward process.
When a teacher is arrested, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation sends a notification to the CDE of the arrest. The CDE is then supposed to forward that information to districts.
But Fort Collins Coloradoan reporter Trevor Hughes has found that the CDE hasn’t been doing so. Jami Goetz, CDE’s executive director of the office of professional services and licensing, told Hughes that the department forwards only a small fraction of the CBI’s notifications.
Instead, Goetz says, due to an oversight the CDE has been filtering the arrest notifications and only sending word to districts of the most serious cases of arrests, such as sex assault, domestic violence, child abuse or other felonies.
How much filtering? Goetz tells us that CBI sends as many as 50 arrest notifications a week — or 2,600 a year. So far in 2010, CDE has forwarded only 10 notifications.
This pitiful performance comes despite the fact the legislature funded three new CDE employees last year to handle the extra workload — though the new hires also are tasked with significant additional duties, Goetz says. (Their combined salaries, minus benefits, total nearly $100,000; this during a time when the state budget has been slashed.)
Goetz tells us that the department has no argument with the new law, and that it is making changes in order to better follow the rule.
The CDE ought to pursue those changes as soon as feasible.
Poudre School District officials say they weren’t notified last year of the arrests of two of their educators who eventually were convicted of serious crimes. A counselor was convicted of sexual abuse on multiple children, and a physical education teacher was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor by giving alcohol to two students.
CDE spokesman Mark Stevens told us Wednesday that officials did contact Poudre School District to notify them that the educators had been arrested.
Obviously, both versions of what happened can’t be correct.
Billions of taxpayer dollars are spent each year supporting our public schools and citizens ought to be able to trust that state education officials are following the proper procedures to help ensure those schools are as safe as possible.
