Sen. Toomey Presses For Stricter Background Checks on School Employees
By Steve Tawa
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Schools are supposed to be safe havens for children, but across the country each year, hundreds of teachers and other school workers are arrested for sexual misconduct.
US senator Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) is introducing legislation for more thorough background checks on school employees, and he hopes to bring it to a vote this week.
Today, Toomey held a round table discussion in center city Philadelphia on the topic of sexual abuse of children and how to prevent it. Among those taking part were women who had been abused as children and were now working as child advocates.
Toomey's legislation would require school employees who have unsupervised access to students to undergo background checks. Toomey says that would include substitute teachers, coaches, classroom aides, and bus drivers who are not already subject to background checks in 12 states.
He says he also wants to close a loophole that allows school officials to unload known pedophiles by helping them land a job in a different school district.
"That, unfortunately, has become a sufficiently well-known phenomenon that it has its own name -- it's called 'passing the trash,' " Toomey said.
Toomey says the background checks would be run through state and federal databases, including those of the FBI and the National Sex Offenders Registry.
Katlyn Pagaduan (seated second from right, partially hidden), who was abused at age 14 by a popular teacher and track coach at Deptford High School, says her ordeal didn't end even after he was sent to prison.
"The coach's son, who I had known since elementary school, took revenge," she said today. "He murdered my boyfriend, Chris, who had convinced me to come forward."
And Kristen Wooley (third from left at table), founder and clinical director of a York, Pa. center which helps women and teenage girls who have endured childhood sexual abuse, said, "Child sexual abuse is an epidemic."
She says she was abused at age ten by a friend of the family and a second time, when she was 15, by a teacher.
Senator Toomey says last year 459 teachers and other school employees nationwide were arrested for sexual misconduct with children. Twenty-six of the arrests were in Pennsylvania.
