EmployeeScreenIQ Blog

WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of the 2004 murder of a student at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, by a classmate with a history of violence against women, the deceased student’s family came to see the decision-making of the university’s admissions office as one of the major factors leading to her death.

After a lawsuit, the North Carolina system began requiring all 11 of its campuses to conduct criminal background checks on students whose records raise red flags. As a panel discussion Wednesday at the annual meeting of the National Association of College and University Attorneys here made clear, North Carolina is not alone. At institutions across the country, admissions officers and student affairs administrators are starting to consider conducting criminal background checks on applicants or admitted students in an extra step toward campus safety.

But the questions of whether and how to conduct student background checks are anything but resolved. The panel included a law professor who has studied the use of criminal background checks in admissions, an administrator from UNC-Wilmington who’s been involved in implementing the system’s policy, and a determined opponent of using checks during the admissions process.

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As important as it is to conduct a background check on potential new hires, it is just as important to ensure your employees are staying out of trouble once they are  hired. 

A Texas Charter School teacher has been fired and now faces criminal charges stemming from an incident caught on video of her assaulting one of her 13-year-old students.  A warrant had been issued for this teacher’s arrest over a year before the assault occurred for criminal mischief - she is accused of slashing another woman’s tires in January of 2009.  If the Charter School had a policy in place to re-check their employees’ background annually, they would have learned of the warrant and taken the appropriate action.  Perhaps then this unfortunate incident would not have occurred.

Charter Teacher Who Beat Student Was Wanted

(May 13) — The Houston charter school teacher caught on a cell-phone video beating a 13-year-old student was wanted on a criminal mischief charge, accused of slashing a woman’s tires last year.

Sheri Lynn Davis, 40, was fired Monday by Jamie’s House Charter School. However, she won’t lose her teaching certificate because she never had one, the Houston Chronicle reported. Texas law states that only bilingual and special education teachers must be certified in order to work at charter schools. Davis is a science teacher.

Davis taught at the charter school for more than a year while a warrant was out for her arrest, stemming from the alleged tire slashing in January 2009. Davis is scheduled to appear in court on that criminal mischief charge, a misdemeanor, on Tuesday, according to Houston’s KRIV-TV. 

She lost her job after school administrators saw a cell phone video recorded by one of her students in late April that showed her slapping and kicking 13-year-old Isaiah Johnson, then dragging him across the floor and slamming his head into a wall. The boy’s mother, Alesha Johnson, said Isaiah suffered a black eye and other bruises in the attack.

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We talk a lot about criminal background checks and checking diploma mill lists prior to employment. Check out this guy.  He lied to get into the college to get a degree he didn’t deserve!  He lied about test scores and accomplishments to get grants and scholarships.  He plagiarized papers to win awards.  This guy might be the single biggest liar I have ever read about.  He’s like the Frank Abagnale of the 21st century.  Now, Wheeler is now facing 20 counts, including larceny, falsifying an
endorsement, identity fraud, and pretending to hold a degree. The article states thee four larceny charges are felony counts that each carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Alleged Harvard Fake Applied at The New Republic
Adam Wheeler Claimed 4.0 Grade Point Average on Internship Application to Publication that Once Featured Faker Stephen Glass

Former Harvard student Adam Wheeler, 23, pleaded not guilty to charges that he lied to get into the Ivy League institution. Prosecutors claimed Tuesday in a Massachusetts court that those say those lies ultimately allowed him to steal $45,000 in grants, scholarship money, and financial aid.

John Verner, prosecutor, said in court Tuesday, “Since Mr. Wheeler began at Harvard, he has lived a life of lies and deceit.”

Even after being caught and kicked out of Harvard, Wheeler actually tried to transfer to Brown University and Yale. His parents, who attended the hearing, forced their son to come clean, and notify Yale that he had been booted from Harvard.

Verner said, “If it wasn’t for his parents’ intervention, Mr. Wheeler’s pathological behavior wouldn’t have stopped.”

Wheeler’s behavior allegedly started on his Harvard application. Wheeler claimed he got a perfect 1,600 on his SAT, had attended the exclusive Phillips Academy prep school, and spent a year at MIT. CBS News correspondent Elaine Quijano reported prosecutors say all claims are false.

Quijano added Wheeler recently Wheeler applied for an internship at the New Republic magazine, claiming a 4.0 grade point average while at Harvard.

The New Republic is where rising star writer Stephen Glass was exposed for making things up in his articles.

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See his fake resume below:

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Many employers wonder why they need to provide an applicant’s date of birth in order to perform thorough employment background checks.  This story below, might convince them of the importance of not only providing the date of birth, but also why it is vitally important to verify the given birth date.

By now, many of you have seen the story about the workplace violence incident that took place at The Ohio State University last week which resulted the shooting death of one employee and a serious wound to another.  The first thing everyone asked, and rightfully so: did the university conduct a background check before hiring this employee?  The answer was yes and the background check didn’t reveal the employee’s past conviction where he spent 5 years in prison for receiving stolen property.  The university says that had it known of the record, they never would have hired the individual.

Of course, the media jumped all of the company that performed the background check.  But before you automatically assume that the screening provider botched the check, here’s an important fact to consider and an equally important lesson for employers. It turns out that the employee provided the school with a fraudulent date of birth.

Why is that a problem?

Nearly all courts file criminal records by name and date of birth (some include more information).  In order to conduct a criminal background check, court researchers must search by both the name and date of birth.  If the date of birth is incorrect, the record will not be found.  Originally, both the school and the media seemed to be squarely blaming the background screening company.  However, it appears that the record was missed because Ohio State ran the check using the wrong date of birth.

So hear is the lesson.  Employers must verify an applicant’s date of birth before performing the background check. All you have to do is look at a driver’s license or other government issued ID.  Failing to do so allows the applicant to provide you with fake information which will ultimately derail your efforts to perform thorough employment background checks.  Verifying the date of birth also helps to avoid innocent mistakes or clerical errors. Now, I’m sure my alma mater had the best intentions in mind.  In truth, my guess is that many organizations forget or neglect to do this.  Unfortunately, the results can be deadly.

For more information on what employers can do to combat workplace violence, please download our recent whitepaper, Protecting Your Employees from Workplace Violence.

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I just read a scary workplace violence story out of Knoxville, TN where a school teacher shot both his principal and assistant principal after his contract was not renewed.  In the aftermath, authorities wondered what the school could have done to prevent this unfortunate incident.  They conducted on a background check and it didn’t raise any red flags.  Well, unfortunately that background check did not include past employment verifications or references.  If they would have contacted the teacher’s most recent prior employer they would have found his former supervisor said that he threatened him with physical harm while in his employ.

We’ve recently spent a lot of time discussing how employers can avoid violence in the workplace (check out our white paper: Protecting Your Employees from Workplace Violence).  One of the key areas for prevention is to conduct a thorough background check.

See this excerpt from a letter written by a Knoxville area human resources professional published on KnoxvilleNews.com:

As a human resources professional, I can’t imagine why his former employers weren’t called as part of his background check. References (which should include past employers) are a basic part of any pre-employment screening process.

When one of his former supervisors was interviewed on a local television station, he said Foster threatened him with physical harm. Why didn’t the person responsible for doing the background check on Foster know that?

On the day the tragedy occurred, Superintendent Jim McIntyre stated that, during Foster’s hiring process, nothing was discovered that caused alarm. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything in his past that would cause alarm. It just means that someone in the Knox County school system’s human resources department obviously didn’t do a thorough job, and they should be held accountable.

Parents have a right to expect that the individuals who are with their children for most of the day are stable and able to nurture them. Foster was teaching fourth-graders and yelling at them.

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First Student Bus Company is in the news again. This time a company driver has been charged with battery for inappropriately touching a 14 year old girl and then offering her $3 not to tell. This is now the fifth incident the company has faced within the last year. According to the Chicago Sun Times, “Oviedo [the aforementioned driver] is one of five First Student drivers to get in trouble with the law last year. One was arrested for exposing himself to a girl. Another was caught with child porn. A driver was shot and killed by police in Riverdale after a high speed chase.

And First Student bus driver Brian Skoglund was arrested for child endangerment and DUI after losing control of his bus on the Edens Expressway. Skoglund had been hired despite getting fired from a Skokie job. He’d been caught driving a Village vehicle erratically and failing a drug test.”

We wrote about the Skoglund incident when it happened last Fall when a First Student spokesperson said that the company conducted “Fantastic Background Checks”.  Now, it appears those practices will be called into question because they are being sued in civil court.

To be fair, we don’t know if this driver had prior records, however we do know that there were missed warning signs with the earlier drivers that would have been revealed by conducting a proper employment background check.  At some point, the schools that contract this work to these companies are going to have to answer as well.  In the meantime, we as parents will have to hold our breath that this doesn’t happen to our kids.

Check out the video.

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A tragic story of workplace violence hits on Friday.  Three faculty members have been killed and three others wounded after a biology professor opened fire inside University of Alabama-Huntsville Friday.  As we entered the weekend more about Amy Bishop’s past began to surface.  From killing her brother with a shotgun twenty years ago to being investigated for a letter bomb at Harvard.

We have written extensively about the lack of proper background checks in schools and universities.  In addition, our soap box has been crushed over the past year from our almost weekly rants on preventing workplace violence.  Our current white paper on workplace violence has become a target for web searchers and has become one of our top searched stories on EmployeeScreen University.

What does this all mean?  Schools, Colleges and Universities really need to step up their screening process.  This is the second major story on workplace violence in the past few months. (Remember the Yale story?)   Would a typical background check have uncovered this tainted past? Its very hard to say because there was no actual conviction.  However, reference checks may have lead them in the right direction!

Ala. prof bemoaned tenure denial, quiet about past

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Amy Bishop kept quiet about a violent episode in her past around colleagues and students at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. But there was one personal issue she didn’t mind loudly complaining about: being denied tenure.

Still, those who knew her said the woman accused of shooting six colleagues had never suggested she might become violent. Everyone from family and friends to her students said the intelligent and at times awkward teacher seemed normal in the hours before police say she opened fire in a faculty meeting Friday afternoon, leaving three dead and three wounded.

Investigators have declined to discuss a motive, but Bishop didn’t hide her displeasure over the fact she’d been denied tenure — a type of job-for-life security afforded to academics.

Bishop was up front about the issue, often bringing it up in meetings where the subject wasn’t appropriate, said William Setzer, chairman of the department of chemistry.

“In committee meetings, she didn’t pretend that it wasn’t happening or anything,” Setzer said. “She was even loud about it: That they denied her tenure and she was appealing it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

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‘Public trust’ employees ace more background checks than many job applicants. But in two hours digging, Volunteer TV News has uncovered a series of incidents dating back to 1995 that, some say, should have raised serious questions to most anybody considering putting Mark Stephen Foster–in charge of 8-and 9-year-olds as fourth grade teacher at Inskip Elementary School.

Terry Mullins says he’s known several people who have shifted career paths drastically once they hit middle age.

But he believes 48-year-old Mark Stephen Foster is a special case.

“I couldn’t possibly imagine how he could go from being a machinst into being a classroom with children,” Mullins says.

That’s why he finds is difficult to believe the fourth grade teacher charged with shooting two principals at Knox County’s Inskip Elementary school, is the same Mark Foster Foster he claims turned violent after being fired for missing too much work at Oak Ridge Tool and Engineering in 1995.

“He actually did threaten my life,” Mullins says.

“Had Oak Ridge Police not intercepted him, I might not be here.
I asked him, with a therapist present, what he would have done had my family been with me if he’d been able to confront me. He looked me straight in the eye and said, I would have kiled them also.”

Mullins says Knox County Schools never called him for a job reference before administrators hired Foster to teach at Inskip in June 2008.

“Many times people are reluctant to divulge the full gamut of their feelings about an individual,” says attorney Rick Hollow.

“They’re afraid of being sued, so many will tell you no more than
when an applicant began work, and when he or she left employment.”

Hollow says that leaves employers few options beyond utilizing public records to conduct more thorough background checks.

Knox County Schools submits applicant’s fingerprints to the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, checks for complaints of abuse with the Department of Children’s Services, and requires a drug screen, according to Superintendent Dr. James McIntyre.

“He (Foster) came up clean,” Dr. McIntyre says.

“Probably most prospective employers do not go that far to check incident reports,” Hollow says.

‘Incident reports’, as law enforcement agencies describe them, are written accounts of investigations in which the findings do not result in criminal charges.

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Questions:

How dumb does a school have to be not to conduct background checks on their employees, let alone their principal?

Do schools have an obligation to protect the children in their care?

Would you hire this person? “Goodman was arrested in May 2008 and sentenced in November 2008 after pleading guilty to two counts of fourth-degree rape and one count each of endangering the welfare of a child and official misconduct.”

Answer: See below.

Delaware schools: IR district sued over rape of student

Indian River School District sanctioned behavior by a former Sussex Central High School principal that led to the repeated rape of a student beginning on New Year’s Day 2008, according to a civil lawsuit filed in Kent County Superior Court.

By failing to perform a proper background check before hiring Dana I. Goodman in 2006, Indian River, as well as its board and superintendent, violated standards schools they are expected to meet in protecting students, said the lawsuit filed last month by Wilmington’s Neuberger Firm. Goodman, who is serving a four-year prison term, also is named in the suit.

Indian River superintendent Susan S. Bunting’s office referred calls to district lawyer Mike Williams. He could not be reached Thursday.

“These things should never happen,” said Stephen J. Neuberger, one of the victim’s lawyers. “This is why schools are supposed to have rigorous hiring practices.”

The victim is not being named because she was a juvenile at the time of the incidents.

In his second year as principal, Goodman, 39, used his position to lure the girl into having sex with him, prosecutors said. According to the civil lawsuit, Goodman fixed it so the girl’s attendance in a class she did not like showed she was there — even though she was not. The teacher knew Goodman was altering the girl’s attendance record, but did nothing, the suit said.

“After Goodman began altering [the girl's] attendance record, he started to incessantly beg plaintiff to repay him for those actions,” the suit said. “He repeatedly told [the girl] that she needed to meet him in the back parking lot of the local Delaware Technical Community College campus.”

Since he was principal and had the power to alter students’ attendance records, the suit said the girl “was afraid of what would happen to her if she did not do as Goodman demanded.”

She met him in the parking lot and got into his vehicle, where Goodman became forceful, removed her clothing and raped her, the suit claims. Afterward, “he repeatedly apologized.”

Goodman was arrested in May 2008 and sentenced in November 2008 after pleading guilty to two counts of fourth-degree rape and one count each of endangering the welfare of a child and official misconduct.

According to the lawsuit, Indian River and its co-defendants had “actual or constructive” notice that Goodman was dangerous to students.

A proper background check would have found that Goodman had sexually abused at least one other female student during his employment in Maryland, it claims, and that a formal complaint was filed against Goodman by Maryland educators.

But even after Goodman’s hiring, Indian River failed to take action after receiving numerous complaints from parents of other students at Sussex Central High School regarding the former principal’s inappropriate interactions with children, the suit says.

The lawsuit is asking for compensatory and punitive damages.

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Notre Dame has fired their over-promising and under-performing head football coach, Charlie Weis.  Rumors are spreading like wildfire for who will replace Weis.  Especially after athletic director, Jack Swarbrick promised to return the school to the era of Knute Rockne, Ara Parseghian, Frank Leahy and Lou Hotlz.  We’ve already heard the names of some pretty heavy hitters as possible candidates: Tony Dungy, Bob Stoops, Jon Gruden, Urban Meyer, Kirk Ferentz, Gary Patterson, Brian Kelly and Jim Harbaugh.

Not a background check story? Think again.  Everyone remembers a few years back when Notre Dame hired an up and coming coach named George O’ Leary to return the team to prominence following a less than stellar performance by his predecessor Bob Davie.  Unfortunately, O’ Leary only lasted a couple days on the job and was unceremoniously terminated because the school found out through media reports that he committed resume fraud and lied about his academic credentials.  Doh!  A simple Education Verification would have saved them the embarrassment that followed.

Here’s hoping they decide to conduct a thorough background check on whoever they bring in.  It will save them time, money and unwanted media attention.

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