UCLA is embarrassed. They missed checking a coach with a criminal past:
One day after news broke that wide receivers coach Eric Scott was arrested for burglary and had a lengthy list of prior arrests and convictions, Guerrero said the school would reserve judgment until it gathered all the facts, but he also made it clear that it knew little about Scott’s past.
UCLA isn’t alone. In Alabama, consternation reigns at the Dothan City Schools. Another employee with background check issues:
[Keaton Lamar] Battle, 34, was arrested last Friday in Donalsonville and charged with two counts of enticing a child for immoral purposes. Until May, Battle had worked as a teaching aide at PASS Academy in Dothan. Neither of the alleged incidents happened at PASS, but one happened while Battle was employed there. The Alabama Child Protection Act of 1999 requires anyone working in a job with unsupervised access to children to be fingerprinted and submit to a background check. The city school system also asks potential hires whether they’ve ever been arrested or convicted of a felony or misdemeanor.
The two incidents are different. But they have the same lesson for you.
The UCLA incident is the “Case of the Background Check that Didn’t Get Done.” UCLA has a policy to conduct background checks on fulltime athletics department staff. But no one did a background check on Eric Scott.
The Dothan incident is the “Case of the Background Check that Came Too Late.” In Alabama, the state runs the background check on teachers and other school employees. According to the Dothan Eagle, Battle worked for the school system for more than six months before his background check revealed an arrest record in Georgia.
The lessons are clear. It doesn’t matter if you have a policy of doing background checks. UCLA had one. It doesn’t matter if you do the background check if you don’t do it soon enough to prevent problems. That’s what happened in Dothan.
Take a couple of minutes to review your own policy and practice and make sure you’re doing the checks you’re supposed to do in a timely and effective way.