Article From the Columbus Dispatch
Columbus, Ohio
Dispatch.com
EMPLOYEE SCREENING
Child-care checks miss offenders
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Ted Hart and Joel Chow
WBNS-10 TV
Kathleen Stultz shouldn’t have been working in a child-care facility, not after pleading no contest to endangering children.
As recently as last week, though, she was doing just that.
Although Stutz’s 2003 conviction should have made her ineligible for child-care employment, two Columbus day-care providers hired her, one in 2004 and the other this year.
Those day-care providers, it turns out, did everything right. They asked Stultz to sign statements confirming that she’d never been convicted of a disqualifying offense, and they ordered background checks from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation.
Stultz signed the statements, and the background checks came back clean.
"We rely on the BCI background checks to be accurate," said Rick Smith, deputy director of the Office for Children and Families, a division of the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, which regulates childcare facilities in the state.
"We react based on the information that background checks give us."
Stutz’s ability to land a job in a field that supposedly was off limits points up what court officials acknowledge could be a serious shortcoming in the state’s efforts to protect children.
At least in Franklin County, convictions show up only on the state background checks of offenders who have been arrested and subjected to a formal booking process, a process that yields fingerprints and an "incident-tracking number."
Individuals such as Stultz, who wasn’t arrested but rather summoned to appear in court, can end up with spotless background checks, despite past convictions.
"If she was not arrested and only summonsed into court, I think that explains why she fell through the cracks," said Mike Rankin, chief deputy clerk of the Franklin County Municipal Court.
Officials with the clerk’s office and the BCI blame each other.
In updating the database it uses for background checks, the BCI can’t process the conviction of any individual who hasn’t been fingerprinted and whose offense hasn’t been assigned an incident-tracking number, said Bob Beasley, a spokesman for the agency.
"Otherwise, you can’t ensure that’s the individual in question," he said. "People have the same names. Fingerprinting ensures you have the right person. That’s the key to the background checks."
Under Ohio law, collecting fingerprints is the responsibility of law-enforcement agencies and courts across the state, not the BCI, Beasley said. Anyone who suggests the BCI hasn’t done its job is "trying to muddy the waters," he added.
An informal survey of courts in Ohio revealed a variety of fingerprinting practices and procedures. The Akron Municipal Court, for example, has set up its own fingerprinting kiosk. Any defendant who hasn’t already gone through formal booking gets fingerprinted on the spot.
Although the Franklin County Municipal Court doesn’t appear to be as aggressive as some of its Ohio counterparts in regard to fingerprinting, Rankin said the "real responsibility" for any gaps in the states background checks lies with the BCI.
The Franklin County clerk’s office has become a "model" in the state by supplying all of the information at its disposal when it reports convictions to the BCI, he said.
"What they do with it and whether they use the information is up to them, because we can’t create an (incident-tracking) number where there hasn’t been an arrest. We can’t order a person to be fingerprinted."
Rankin said he hopes Stutz’s case prompts the BCI to "start taking information on all convictions, with or without (a tracking) number."
Regardless of who’s at fault in Stutz’s case, all of the parties involved should look for a way to "get everybody on the same page," Rankin said.
"The reality is, there could be others like this," he said. "There are plenty of people who are summonsed into court who are not arrested on misdemeanors and felonies."
According to preliminary data obtained yesterday by WBNS-TV (Channel 10), the Franklin County clerk’s office has sent 83,506 records to the BCI since June 2002. More than 40 percent of those records, 35,943, lacked an incident tracking number, meaning, in theory at least, that none of those convictions would show up on a BCI background check.
"Church volunteers, youth groups, day-care camps, they’re all thinking the people they hired have done nothing to endanger children and have a clean record," said Yvette McGee Brown, president of the Center for Child and Family Advocacy and former Juvenile Court judge.
"It’s exposing thousands, hundreds of thousands, of children to risk."
To Marcelle Wilkins, the numbers from the Franklin County clerk’s office represent more than a troubling statistic.
In 2003, Stultz regularly watched Wilkins’ son Marcus in a day-care center she operated in her home. One evening, without telling Wilkins, Stultz left Marcus, then 19 months old, and several other children in the care of a relative so she could go to a baby shower.
When Wilkins next saw her son, his top two front teeth were missing. X-rays showed they had been knocked into the youngster’s nasal cavity. Even now, doctors don’t know whether his adult teeth will come in normally.
Wilkins reported the incident, and prosecutors charged Stultz with endangering children. After pleading no contest, she was fined and placed on probation.
Stultz was fired from her most recent child-care job late last week, after her employer received inquiries from WBNSTV and the Department of Job and Family Services.
Stultz insists she never has tried to hide her 2003 conviction or mislead prospective employers. She said she does regret not reporting Marcus’ injury even though, she said, she bore no direct responsibility.
"I was the person on the license, so I got held accountable for it," she said. "But I did not abuse the child. I did not physically harm the child."
Wilkins doesn’t have any sympathy for her former childcare provider.
"People make mistakes, but that was more than a mistake," she said. "You know you have other people’s children, you don’t just leave them."
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