Georgia moved one step closer Monday to falling in line with a majority of the country in mandating federal background checks for all childcare workers.
By a vote of 153 to 16, the state House approved legislation to expand the requirements for FBI fingerprint background checks to all childcare center employees, not just center directors.
Currently, frontline childcare center workers, including bus drivers, are subject to name-based records checks that largely pick up crimes committed in Georgia. But, under House Bill 350, those workers would be required to submit to the same FBI fingerprint screenings as their bosses. Those screenings could turn up offenses in other states, including sex crimes.
State Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, the bill’s sponsor, argued before the House that, right now, parents could be leaving their children for eight hours a day with a person who has committed an armed robbery or other felonies in another state.
“Kind of shocking, isn’t it?” Peake said. “For the safety of our children, I humbly ask for your yes vote on House Bill 350.”
If the bill is approved by the Senate and signed by the governor, Georgia would become the 32nd state to mandate FBI fingerprint checks for childcare workers, according to child advocates.
The state currently has about 6,000 childcare centers and about 24,000 workers who would be affected by the law change, according to the state agency that regulates the child care industry, Bright from the Start: Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.
The federal background checks will be more expensive — $50.15 per person, compared to $12-$15 per person for the state checks. Centers will have some time to adjust. New employees will be subject to the FBI checks in 2014, while current employees would be exempt until 2017, Peake said.
The fingerprint checks also would be repeated every five years, he said.
Bobby Cagle, commissioner of Bright from the Start, has lobbied for the tougher federal background check.
“This is purely preventive,” Cagle said. “My worry is we may have folks working in these centers who we might not want working there if we knew their full backgrounds.”
Child care providers are supportive of the law change.
“We think this bill is absolutely the right thing to do,” said Blythe Keeler Robinson, president and CEO of Atlanta-based Sheltering Arms Early Education & Family Centers.
She applauded DECAL officials “for the thought they have already put into the implementation of this bill.”
“They are putting children’s safety first, but also are thinking creatively about how to help early education programs shoulder the extra cost associated with a national background check,” Robinson said.
Carolyn Salvador, executive director of the Georgia Child Care Association, said it would not be good for Georgia not to impose the tougher background checks already in place in all of the surrounding states.
“We don’t want to be that donut hole that sex offenders migrate to,” Salvador said.
The childcare industry is already under financial stress, and the added costs of the federal background checks will likely be “hard to absorb,” she said.
“But we want to be able to keep children safe,” Salvador said.
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