COEUR d’ALENE — A Coeur d’Alene school board member is calling for improvements to the practices school districts use for hiring employees.

Christa Hazel wrote, in an email she sent to patrons who reached out to her this week, that she began fielding parent inquiries about the school district’s hiring process in the fall of 2015.

“I sought out ways we could improve. I asked questions to seek to clarify and improve our hiring practices,” Hazel wrote.

State and school district policy requires employee fingerprint cards to be turned in to the district’s human resources department when a new employee begins working for the district.

Hazel was concerned to learn the analyis of those fingerprints is not completed for several weeks.

The district administration responded to The Press’s questions about this in an unsigned written statement. It said, under Idaho law: “...all Coeur d’Alene School District employees must be fingerprinted within five days after they start employment and pass a criminal background check conducted by the Idaho Department of Education, in conjunction with Idaho State Police. The results to this criminal history check are typically returned by the Department of Education within 10 – 14 weeks after being submitted.”

Hazel told The Press this verifies the school district can have a person working in the schools for up to three months before being able to confirm an individual’s application is truthful and that other hiring information is accurate. She said she thinks most parents assume a new hire has been checked prior to arriving on a school campus.

“My experience as a parent did not match what I was seeing as a trustee,” she said.

Last year, Hazel began more closely reviewing candidates being considered for hire by the school district. After doing some research, she began often voting “no” on the district administration’s hiring recommendations.

The final step in the school district’s hiring process is board approval of each new employee. Each month, when trustees gather for their regular board meeting, the district administration presents a list of personnel actions, including new hires, for approval. Often, the employees have already been hired and are working in the classrooms.

This personnel list is placed in the meeting’s consent agenda, where to save time, governing boards often combine multiple items — routine orders of business — for general consent at the start of a meeting.

It is unusual for an item to be pulled from a consent agenda for a vote on its own, but in March, the Coeur d’Alene school board did just that. The trustees approved most of that meeting’s consent agenda, but rejected the personnel recommendations presented by the administration.

Because these are personnel issues exempt from public disclosure under Idaho’s open meeting and public records laws, there was no public discussion by the trustees about their failure to approve the March personnel list. However, a quick review of the list of candidates presented to the board revealed that one, who was hired to work in an elementary school, was convicted multiple times of criminal charges since 2011 and was sentenced to jail several times. This information is available to the public online at the Idaho State Judiciary’s data repository.

This employee’s effective date was Feb. 27, a week before the trustees met and were asked to approve his hiring.

“The Coeur d’Alene School District does meet the legal requirements for employee background checks. The School District recognizes the need to constantly improve this process and has been moving toward improving this process for some time,” stated the district’s statement to The Press. “For example, the District recently updated its hiring practices to include online searches through Facebook and Google, as well as Idaho repository searches. The District is also looking into contracting with third-party vendors to provide supplemental and/or additional search options.”

Hazel said she was surprised and glad to know the additional online searches are now being done pre-emptively while the district waits for the results of the criminal background checks from the state.

“Trustees can now make more informed decisions when hiring employees,” Hazel said.

Tom Hamilton, a former school district trustee who served from 2011 to 2015, said Friday he shares many of Hazel’s concerns.

“If the safety of our kids is the most important thing you do, you knock down any obstacles to make sure kids are safe in the classroom,” Hamilton said. “And if you know there’s a problem, no matter what problems it causes you, you don’t hire them. It deliberately puts kids at risk if you do.”

Hazel and Hamilton both noted school districts are often under the gun when it comes to hiring desperately needed new teachers at the start of each school year.

“I hope Idaho, and especially the Coeur d’Alene School District, is geared for the challenge to engage in a meaningful way to ensure our children are safe in our schools. For the most part, I believe we are,” Hazel wrote, in her email to school district patrons. “I would love to see our state’s leaders discuss new opportunities to streamline costs but more importantly streamline timing so we can quickly assist our Idaho districts instead of grinding schools to a halt with long investigations taking place so we can ensure safe staff.

“We need good, qualified, safe teachers, secretaries, custodians, lunch ladies, and bus drivers. They are out there. Idaho patrons and parents should never settle or compromise on the excuse of ‘shortage’ in hiring subpar employees with obvious red flags. A true professional would not want a subpar employee in their midst either.”

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Maureen Dolan can be reached by email at mdolan@cdapress.com or on Twitter @MaureenCDAPress.