Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Malone In Hot Seat Over CORI Info

By Lisa E. Crowley
BrocktonPost
BROCKTON—Superintendent Matthew Malone is under fire again from Brockton School Committee members after information Malone provided committee members and parents about school staff background checks for the second time turned out to be wrong.
During a school committee meeting Tuesday night, for the second time Malone took responsibility for misinformation regarding background checks—an issue that arose three weeks ago following the arrest of Kevin Treseler, a 21-year-old Stonehill College student who has been charged with rape and sexual abuse against a third-grade girl in the Angelo Elementary School during class time where he worked as a tutor.
Malone last night said he was wrong when he told School Committee members during a closed session of the board last week that the school department was in compliance with all aspects of the state Criminal Offenders Record Information, or CORI, background checks—including a requirement that all employees be rechecked every three years.
“I can’t trust what’s been done in the past,” Malone said trying to explain why he told school committee members current teachers had been rechecked after working in the school department for 3 years.
All, Malone said, were checked upon hiring, but the required recheck did not take place in 2007.
“There are thousands of pieces of paper to figure it out. It’s a waste of my time to go through it all and figure out who was or wasn’t checked,” Malone said after the meeting. “Instead of going back, I’m just putting in my own system and fixing the problem,” he said.
He said he could not give a number of how many teachers or staff members were or were not checked after the three-year recheck deadline.
The school department, has about 1,350 full-time teachers and staff and about 500 more part-time, said School Financial Officer Aldo Petroni.
School committee member Tim Sullivan said he was disappointed with Malone’s misinformation.
“I feel like I was misled by you. I passed that information on to parents,” Sullivan said.
School committee member William Carpenter said he did the same thing and was surprised to learn Malone had again misinformed the committee and subsequently the public.
“You assured me we were in compliance and now we’re not,” Carpenter said.
The state’s 3-year rule requires all teachers and staff employed in a public school undergo a CORI check upon being hired and again every 3 years.
Malone said he had no idea how many were checked in 2007 and that the 2008 rechecks will be done now along with the 2007 rechecks.
School committee members said they wanted solutions to the problem, including history of past procedures as well as Malone’s recommendation for the school department to update its software systems to electronically record data like employee CORI checks.
Malone said because the current system is a paper and file system that requires a person to match paper CORI authorization forms with paper CORI checks the system is inefficient and difficult to match who was checked and who was not.
Carpenter said while the move to update software systems is a step in the right direction, he demanded copies—the paper copies—of the 2007 authorization forms signed by teachers and staff for permission to have their backgrounds checked.
“Did we miss 10 or 1,010?” Carpenter asked. “The only way to get that answer is to find out the history of what happened—I want to know,” he said.
After initially arguing against it, saying because finger-pointing wouldn’t solve the problem , Malone agreed to provide Carpenter with the authorization forms when other school committee members supported Carpenter’s request.
School committee member James Daley said while no one wants to finger-point he asserted that if an employee is not doing their job correctly, maybe there should be finger-pointing.
“If somebody doing the job is incompetent they should be removed,” Daley said. “There’s a lack of confidence in the information that is coming out. We have to regain that confidence,” he said.

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