Nevada School Background Check Bill Gets Senate Approval
Title: Nevada School Background Check Bill Gets Senate Approval
In a move to require more thorough background checks for employees of the Nevada school district, the Nevada senate panel has unanimously passed a background check bill (Assembly Bill 362). The legislation has come in response to a recent sexual misconduct crisis in the Clark County School district dubbed Broken Trust, by investigative reporters.
Among other things, the law will prohibit districts from agreeing to keep sexual misconduct investigations under wraps. Additionally the law requires the districts’ job applicants to:
- be forthright about past allegations
- disclose whether there were pending allegations at a job they left
- reveal if they’ve had suspended or revoked licenses while allegations were pending
An advocate of the bill and president of Stop Educator Sexual Abuse Misconduct and Exploitation, Terri Miller, is quoted as saying, “Our state has had far too many cases of teachers abusing our trust. It appears to be an epidemic that is on the rise.”
The Value of Investigative Background Checks
Like the reporters who broke the Broken Trust story in Nevada, thorough background checks require an investigative philosophy and methodology. One of the incidents cited in Broken Trust is of an elementary school teacher who was arrested in 2012 for statutory rape of a high school student. The district’s response to the discovery was to agree to leave the incident undocumented in his personnel file in exchange for his resignation.
For many of us, there may not be children at risk if the background checks of our prospective employees or tenants fail, the risk is great enough to invest in thorough, investigative background checks to protect our companies, properties, assets, and employees.
Contact VICTIG to learn more.
Dating App Runs Background Checks on User’s Matches
Dating is a screening process. Each of us are or have been our own version of a hiring manager for our lives, selecting and interrogating candidates for romantic partnerships, vetting and disqualifying, hiring and letting go. With the proliferation of dating technologies, we’ve been given a few interesting tools that make the work of protecting ourselves while finding new love or connections just a little bit easier and safer.
Dating Apps and Background Checks
You might be thinking that the pairing of the two seems like a no-brainer, but a newly launched dating app called Gatsby (named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional character Jay Gatsby) is the first mobile application to unite the swiping-based functionality of Tinder with the no-nonsense vetting philosophy of a corporate firm.
Gatsby seeks to protect its romantic-minded users by:
- conducting background checks on everyone who signs up for the app
- using profile to search public databases (criminal records and sex offender registries)
- rescanning matches on a monthly basis
- deterring those with criminal records from attempting to sign up at all
A Step in the Right Direction
While Gatsby isn’t the first to rigorously vet its members (websites eHarmony and Match have made strides in that direction), it is the first to do so on a mobile platform. In the future, it is likely that Tinder will join the movement, making the work of finding committed and casual partners that much less nerve-wracking.
What Do You Think?
You do it with potential employees, but if you could run a background check on all of your dating prospects, would you? Share your thoughts in the comments!