The
Jessica Lunsford Act
The Jessica Lunsford Act, enacted
by the 2005 Legislature, is helping to help protect children from
assault by high-risk sexual offenders, mostly by increased monitoring
of sexual offenders and predators once they re-enter the community.
The law has come to the attention of the business community
because it also requires background screens for non-instructional
or contractual personnel who provide services to traditional public
schools, charter schools, and alternative schools. It has proven
a costly mandate that some school districts may be abusing. Any
employee of a private contractor with access to school grounds
or funds must now undergo a Level 2 background screen, which is
a check of the person’s fingerprints against the state and
national databases.
School districts have been encouraged to share background screening
results with other public school districts so that an employee
working in multiple districts only has to undergo one screening.
Many districts have not done so, citing concerns about liability.
As a result, a vendor or contractor with an employee working in
more than one county would have to pay each county to conduct
the exact same background check multiple times, rather than conducting
the screen once and sharing the information with each different
county.
School boards are allowed to charge a processing fee, which in
one district runs as high as $43. The fee is added on to the $47
charge for checking the state and federal databases. Depending
on the school district, a private contractor or vendor must pay
anywhere from $60 to $90 before an employee can enter school grounds
to fulfill his duties.
This delays the delivery of services that school districts need
while driving up the costs for those services.
Sen. Nancy Argenziano (R-Crystal River), the sponsor of the Jessica
Lunsford Act, wants lawmakers to enact a glitch bill to fix a
few problems with the bill. One area that needs to be addressed
is defining ‘incidental contact’ with a student so
that someone who would have direct contact with a student would
have to undergo a more rigorous screening process than would delivery
persons or other employees. AIF believes that the issue of information
sharing among school districts should also be addressed in any
potential glitch legislation.
At the request of House Speaker Allan Bense (R-Panama City)
and Senate President Tom Lee (R-Brandon) the commissioner of the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, Guy Tunnell, established
a database on background check information so that districts could
check on vendors and contractors who had already undergone screening.
This is an imperfect solution, however, because only the district
requesting the check would be notified if the status of a vendor
or contractor changed.
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