Austin school district first to test state fingerprinting system

On Sunday, December second, Raven L. Hill writes about the Austin School district being the first in the state to try a fingerprinting system that requires public school employees to have nation criminal background checks. You can read the story here. Under a new state law, an estimated 392,000 Texas employees need to submit their fingerprints to the Texas Education Agency. All others must submit by September 2011. Employees such as the janitors, cafeteria workers and other support hired after Jan. 1 will be subjected to the fingerprint background checks as well, those hired before then will only face statewide checks. I cannot believe that state officials agree with using Austin as a test.
In the absence of national searches, school districts have "ticking time bombs" in their midst, said Doug Phillips, director of investigations and fingerprinting at the state education agency. Phillips also said "you don't necessarily know who you have until you run that fingerprint," "we've been behind the rest of nation, now we will actually be out front of a lot of states by fingerprinting everybody." Please tell me Doug Phillips how being behind in education matters will be made up for when you start fingerprinting the teachers? It wont, it has nothing to do with being 'behind' , it has to do with the state wanting to start fingerprinting everyone so they can have track of what and who everywhere. I do not believe it is right for people like Phillips to use such an emotionally charged issue to take the focus away from more pressing matters. Of course parents are going to be 'pro-printing' because they are going to want to protect their children, and now wheres the focus on actually education spending? I think that Texas should work on educating the kids so they will be at a level where the teachers are worth fingerprinting, right now Texas is ranked so low this is sort of a joke, and why is this such a priority? They say the test is going to cost between $50- $60 a teacher. Average $55 a test means the state racks in $1,936,275.00, Payday!
California, Florida, and New York are among the sates that require all school employees to be fingerprinted. Some Texas school districts implemented national background checks years ago.

Response to: Perry joins book writing band wagon

I am not surprised to hear that Rick Perry Joins the book writing band wagon. What not a better time either than election time. It does not surprise me that Perry wrote a book about his childhood memories because he is a politician, and as a politician he is one of the most predictable ones. Perry loves to do what everyone else is doing especially if it will give him a vote. I do think Perry is seriously considering running with Giuliani if he wins the Republican nomination, even though he has said no. Perry probably chose for the book to be about his childhood memories because, well, who would read it if he wrote about anything else? So having to be remotely interesting and connected with 'real people' lives, he wrote about his time as a boy scout. The book, which is due out in February, comes with the announcement that he is receiving the 2007 Distinguished Citizen Award from, yes, you guessed it, the Boy Scouts of America Capitol Area Council of Austin. I do not think this book was written for the Boy scouts of Americas' image, but better yet for Perry's image, because the boy scouts are already well known, honored gentleman of society and I don't think they need to work on their image, it's Perry that needs to work.