School Volunteer Background Checks Keeping You Up At Night?

Does your current school volunteer background checks policy keep you awake at night?  If you are relying on a cheap “national” database search or a limited statewide search, then I understand your restless nights.

I understand the balancing act of providing the best safety and security possible with school budgets, especially the impact from COVID-19.  Sadly, many background screening firms are peddling fear and low lever volunteer background checks that are priced to be appealing but provide very limited protection against predators.

The good news is there are options for conducting comprehensive volunteer background checks and not depleting the budget.  We partner with thousands of school districts across the U.S. and a growing number of them are adopting one of the following policy changes:

• Volunteers pay for part of the background check; or

• Volunteers pay for the entire background check

We recently released a podcast on The Safety Zone discussing Reducing the Risk of a Perfect Storm for School Violence which focuses on not creating tunnel vision on COVID and redacting safety and security protocols that have been implemented over the past many years.

Over the past two years, we have developed several unique screening solutions that can lead to cost savings on volunteer screening:

• ArrestAlert® This converts your volunteer background check program to a real-time solution while at the same time reducing your costs because it allows you to increase the time between re-checks.  Plus, you will receive real-time notifications if your volunteers are arrested anywhere in the U.S.

• Arrest PreSearch.  This allows you to query a proprietary database of arrest records from booking institutions as part of your screening program and can reduce the cost of volunteer background checks by reducing the need for expensive hand-searches unless a record is found to exist.

Here is a case study for the 7th largest school district in the U.S. who has 50,000 volunteers AND 100 different community partners that volunteer in their 250+ school buildings.  Process prior to adopting our SafeVolunteer Solution: 

• 300 volunteer coordinators reviewed the applications

• Each volunteer was entered manually into 4 different databases to check for criminal records at the local and state level.

• Extremely labor intensive

• No safeguards for typing names correctly

• No solution for confirming identity of the applicants

• No solution for confirming “other names” they have been known by

• 50,000 volunteers re-screened every year

SafeVolunteer adoption: 

• Converted to an integrated process and reduced from a team of 300 to 5

• Converted to a national background check

• Added SSN validation and other names

• Added Arrest PreSearch

• Added ArrestAlert for real-time notifications

• Automated renewals

Volunteer background checks are a critical piece of a 360 school security solution. 

Learn more about our volunteer background checks and our integration with SafeVolunteer by emailing us.

or

Call toll free 866.434.0002