Tonya Maxwell

tmaxwell@citizen-times.com

To read our special report on N.C. failing on teacher screening, clickhere.

State elected and education officials are anticipating legislation to bolster North Carolina’s lackluster teacher screening system, one that has allowed teachers with troubled backgrounds to work in Tar Heel classrooms.

Following investigations into the screening system by the Citizen-Times and the USA TODAY NETWORK, North Carolina Lt. Gov. Dan Forest said his office is examining documents and past legislation and expects new policy to be put before lawmakers in the upcoming short session.

“We’re going to be sharing that with folks at (the Department of Public Instruction) and the legislature to get this process going long before we get to session on April 25,” he said. “This needs to be on the forefront of what we’re doing in the short session, and it should be a fairly easy lift to make that happen.”

Forest said he anticipates the State Board of Education will likely need to establish new rules on teacher screenings, while lawmakers would need to draft supporting legislation.

The measures would likely win bipartisan support, and funding would be made available to keep schoolchildren safe, he said.

His review began after the newspaper's investigation determined North Carolina has one of the worst teacher screening systems in the nation. It relies on the state’s 115 local districts to check backgrounds on prospective teachers, rather than centralizing criminal checks at the state level, which provides for safer classrooms, experts say.

One of the most important measures is a fingerprint background check of prospective teachers at the state level, said June Atkinson, the state superintendent of North Carolina public schools.

She also expects legislation to be submitted during the short session, which will be formally discussed in an April meeting of the State Board of Education. That 13-member board sets the legislative agenda for the Department of Public Instruction.

How to look up the background of teachers in every state

Problems with teacher screening have long been known inside the agency, prompting Atkinson to appoint a task force to examine the issue. It produced a report of 15 recommendations in 2010, though none was implemented.

Only late last year did DPI move away from an antiquated paper system, one that stayed in place for too long because of inadequate funding.

“One of the major problems we had in 2010 is we had a very manual system for issuing teacher licensing, so it took us a while to get a sufficient amount of money to change a system that had been in existence in 1985 to one that could automatically do some work for us,” Atkinson said. “It is a step in the right direction for us to be able to catch people who should not be in the classroom."

The state’s disparate and old screening system failed to catch a Charlotte teacher who had been rejected by two neighboring states for allegedly assaulting two students and sending lewd photos to a ninth grade girl. He was placed on paid suspension in January following inquiries by the Citizen-Times.

Katie Cornetto, staff attorney for DPI, said the agency already has begun internal reviews, which should ultimately result in better protections for North Carolina’s schoolchildren.

“The State Board of Education is the head of the agency (DPI), and they are going to take this up at their board meeting,” Cornetto said. “At this point, there are internal meetings discussing the task force report and the news reports.”

Updating data

Cornetto said her office, which issues teachers licenses, is also reviewing and updating a national clearinghouse used across the country to notify state officials of educators who have had disciplinary actions.

Run by a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, provides automatic notifications to subscribers if one of their teachers has had a license revoked or suspended elsewhere.

In a national review of the NASDTEC database, the USA TODAY NETWORK determined up to 154 North Carolina educators who have had disciplinary actions against their licenses may never have been uploaded into the clearinghouse, meaning other states where they could seek employment would have a more difficult time learning of past troubles.

Earlier this month, the Citizen-Times sent those 154 names to Cornetto for review. Her office has so far determined about 20 of those individuals were uploaded to NASDTEC, while about 80 never made it to the clearinghouse.

The other 50 revoked licenses are from older cases and are still being researched using paper records, she said.

Mountain-area teachers who have had their North Carolina teaching licenses revoked but were not uploaded to NASDTEC include James Patrick Carney, a former band director at Erwin High School, and Leslie Lamb Messer, a North Henderson High School special education teacher.

Each was charged with offenses that stemmed from having intercourse with a student. Carney was convicted in 2006, while Messer pleaded to a lesser charge following a 2011 arrest.

The license of Bryant Poole, a Graham County teacher, was revoked in 2014 after he was found to have nude photos on a school computer, but that disciplinary action also never appeared in the national database.

In North Carolina, officials at the state level have access to the database, which has been unavailable to individual districts, though NASDTEC officials have said they expect to be offering that option in a pilot program.

Cornetto said her office — which consists of herself and paralegal, each with other duties — is updating the database, and she is examining why information she believed had been submitted did not flow to the national clearinghouse.

She said she suspects a clerical error: A “submit” button may not have been pressed on the Internet-based form.

The failure of the proper use of the NASDTEC database also allowed a teacher who had been booted out of two Southern states to find employment in a North Carolina classroom.

Georgia officials in October revoked the license of math teacher Alexander Michael Stormer, 35, on findings that he injured one student, pushed another in the chest and texted a lewd photo to a ninth grade girl and asked her for sex.

He resigned from that high school in March, but obtained teaching licenses in both Carolinas before Georgia officials completed their investigation.

When his license was formally revoked there and uploaded to the clearinghouse, South Carolina learned immediately of the action and launched its own inquiry, resulting in the termination of his teaching license.

Stormer, though, was already teaching in a Charlotte school, a position he obtained six weeks after he quit his Georgia job. But Charlotte-Mecklenburg school officials, who are not subscribed to the NASDTEC database, never learned of his problems, only a state line away.

As North Carolina state education officials look to improve their use of the clearinghouse, several school districts across the state said they also are looking at accessing the information.

NC fails in screening for problem teachers