Iowa moves forward with school bus driver background checks but limits scope

Driven in part by an incident of sexual child abuse by a school bus driver in the Eastern Allamakee School District, legislators in Iowa passed a law mandating background checks for school bus drivers. Specifically it would require that schools check whether their bus drivers are on one of two state registries: the Iowa sex offender registry and the Iowa adult- and child-abuse registry. Moreover, the law mandates that this information is reverified every five years. And the school also has to search the state’s court records which they can do for free online

Up until now Iowa was one of the few states in the nation not mandating any kind of checks against bus drivers. And some think that law is deficient in limiting these checks to only bus drivers, and not including other school employees, such as custodians, groundskeepers and cooks

But even for the bus drivers checks the limited geographical scope of the background check leaves still a lot of rooms for the search to miss criminal records that the driver might have in other states. And while registring for local sex offender registries is mandatory for people that move from state to state, not everybody does that.

backgroundchecks.com always recommends complemeting traditional state or county specific searches with an instant search across multiple jurisdictions using their instant criminal background check database. One of the products that does that is the US OneSEARCH. That would immediately search not ony criminal records in all 50 states, but also search the combined and historic offender registraties from across the nation.

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backgroundchecks.com - a founding member of the National Association of Professional Background Screeners (NAPBS®) - serves thousands of customers nationwide, from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies by providing comprehensive screening services.  Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with an Eastern Operations Center in Chapin, S.C., backgroundchecks.com is home to one of the largest online criminal conviction databases in the industry. For more information about backgroundchecks’ offerings, please visit www.backgroundchecks.com.

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Source:http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120327/NEWS02/303270073/-1/SPORTS09/Driver-abuse-case-sparked-background-checks-bill