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Up to 50 people with Utah jobs as public school teachers were recently found to have criminal violations after undergoing employee background checks.

According to an article by The Salt Lake Tribune, all of the state’s 20,000 licensed teachers were recently required to undergo criminal history checks as part of an effort to improve the system for performing background checks on school employees.

The names released by public safety officials came from a new computer data bank of 112,000 school employee names and birth dates that were cross referenced against Utah arrests dating back to the 1960s.

The data bank is designed to identify school workers who do not report arrests themselves. Although the measure was mandated by law in 1999, it was not created until this year.

Even though the number of teachers found to have severe criminal violations represents only one-quarter of 1 percent of all the teachers in Utah, the findings will create three times as much work for the Utah Professional Practices Advisory Commission, which is responsible for investigating teachers for misconduct.

Many of the employees involved were arrested or convicted long ago and some charges have been dismissed, making the process even more complicated. To add to that, all of the 41 school districts throughout Utah also are investigating other classified employees, including custodians, lunch clerks and secretaries, who have been found to have criminal violations.

Although the total number of employees found to have criminal records has not been published, public safety officials reported finding almost 7,000 arrests, criminal charges or convictions. So far, nine employees have been fired as a result of the background checks.

The majority of the crimes, however, occurred more than 15 years ago, during a time period when background checks were not required. Most crimes were for minor traffic violations, isolated shoplifting charges, domestic disputes, underage drinking and disturbing the peace.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 11:57 am and is filed under Background Checks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.