Tonya Maxwell

tmaxwell@citizen-times.com

The March text messages between a ninth-grader and a 34-year-old teacher were lurid enough to merit a call to Atlanta police. Alexander Michael Stormer, then a Georgia public school math teacher, and the student exchanged late-night messages and in one, he wrote, “hey baby, I love you, say you love me, when are you gonna give me some [slang],” investigators found after reviewing the girl’s phone.

Stormer and the girl also exchanged photos of their genitals, according to the findings of the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, which investigates teacher misconduct allegations.

Just days earlier at the same school, Stormer had twice been accused of assaulting two students, once pushing a girl in the chest and into a wall after she told him to stop looking at her friend’s backside. That incident, caught on a school surveillance camera, occurred March 10.

As school officials in Georgia launched an investigation into his actions, Stormer resigned. Six weeks later, he had a new batch of students, this time in a North Carolina public school classroom, thanks in large part to a fragmented system for checking teacher backgrounds that is among the nation’s least effective.

Stormer began teaching mathematics at the Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology, a magnet school in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, but was suspended with pay last month, days after the Asheville Citizen-Times alerted officials that Stormer’s teaching license had been pulled not only in Georgia, but South Carolina as well.

The Stormer case represents more than the troubling actions of a single teacher. It illustrates a flawed and disparate teacher tracking system in North Carolina, one that can allow educators to become licensed and work in Tar Heel schools, their prior acts unknown to officials and their superiors.

In a nationwide investigation, the USA TODAY NETWORK, which includes the Asheville Citizen-Times, found fundamental defects in teacher screening systems used to ensure the safety of children in schools in almost every state.

The patchwork system of laws and regulations, combined with inconsistent execution and flawed information sharing between states and school districts, fails to keep teachers with histories of serious misconduct out of classrooms.

In reviewing states, the USA TODAY NETWORK handed North Carolina an F, ranking it among the worst states in the country for screening teachers.

The Citizen-Times found education officials throughout the state – including in Asheville and Buncombe County – have long recognized the system for screening prospective teachers is antiquated and should be streamlined, but flaws have not been addressed to better protect students.

The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction years ago assembled a statewide task force to address the issue, but failed to push its concerns to state lawmakers, who were needed to pass legislation on some measures.

To better ensure the safety of students, the task force recommended that prospective teachers be subject to fingerprint background checks at the state level – a common practice in most states – and investigators dedicated to teacher misconduct cases should be funded within the Department of Public Instruction.

On the national level, and particularly among Southeastern states, North Carolina is known as a “cesspool,” welcoming questionable educators other states have rejected, said Bob McGrattan, former assistant superintendent of human resources for Asheville City Schools.

Shortly before his retirement, McGrattan headed the task force, and in 2010, the group’s two dozen members issued a report with 15 recommendations to strengthen the system and bring it in line with best practices in other states.

Many of the recommendations called for centralizing oversight at the state level, rather than across North Carolina’s 115 school districts, which are now charged with backgrounding teacher candidates.

None of the recommendations were implemented.

In Asheville, McGrattan said his office worked to recruit top teacher candidates and paid a private vendor to check criminal histories.

But he maintains the disparate district system is rife with problems: A large metropolitan county like Charlotte-Mecklenburg is so hungry for educators that it strains the local human resource officials charged with keeping track of them, while the small, rural districts are more prone to nepotism.

“We found out in the task force that it’s much harder to get a license to be a Realtor or a fireman or a cosmetologist than it was to be a teacher,” said McGrattan, who retired in 2012 after 25 years with Asheville city schools. “But it basically went nowhere because it involved money. Some states are very diligent about that whole process. If you’re allowing a person to teach in the state of North Carolina, North Carolina should be able to say, ‘This person meets our requirements.’ Currently, that’s not the case.”

The task force was intended to create best practices in teacher screening, but without any implementation, McGrattan said he was not surprised North Carolina fared poorly.

“That’s what we were trying to stop back when the task force met,” McGrattan said. “We were hoping the task force would shed some light in the media and pressure the General Assembly to take some actions to stop it. It never happened.”

In the state’s private schools, teachers do not need to be licensed. Those that do hold the certification are subject to disciplinary measures against their license should they run afoul of criminal law or ethics standards. The state Division of Non-Public Education encourages – but does not require – private schools to run background checks on teachers.

Years before the allegations of assault and sexting in Georgia, Stormer taught in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, and returned there after his March resignation.

That summer, unaware of the investigation only hours away in Atlanta, North Carolina officials renewed his teaching credentials. South Carolina also granted him a license.

But within two months, the Carolinas diverged in their handling of Stormer.

Georgia officials on Oct. 8 found Stormer’s actions against students constituted child abuse under teacher professional standards policy and formally revoked his license there.

That action was uploaded into a database run by a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit, the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification, which allows school officials at the state level to check disciplinary actions against educators in other jurisdictions.

South Carolina holds a membership to that database and was instantly alerted that one of its teachers had his Georgia license revoked, according to a state school spokesman.

It opened its own investigation on Oct. 9 and contacted its counterparts in Georgia. Within two months, Stormer surrendered his license, agreeing that he would not teach children in public schools there.

The USA TODAY NETWORK graded South Carolina with an A for its strong state level screenings.

An hour’s drive north, in Charlotte, officials were unaware of Stormer’s troubled teaching record.

While North Carolina state education officials also hold a membership to the same database, the state’s decentralized backgrounding system relies on local districts to police their own teachers, a practice used by 10 other states, and one that experts say is problematic, leaving cracks wide enough for adults who should not be teachers to slip into classrooms.

After being informed of Stormer by the Citizen-Times and a related USA Today investigation of troubled teachers, a Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district spokeswoman said officials would like a tool to more easily identify educators who have had problems elsewhere.

“It would be our hope that your story might inspire a national teacher license clearinghouse that would list license revocations from any and all states, so that districts would only need to enter a name and any revocation from any state would pop up,” Renee McCoy wrote in an email. “Just a thought.”

Informed that such a clearinghouse exists, district officials later said they are considering a membership.

The database is not open to individual school districts, but the association is moving forward with that option.

Buncombe County officials are also looking at joining the clearinghouse after inquiries by the Citizen-Times. They also would like to see a more streamlined backgrounding system, one that begins at the state level.

North Carolina is a member of the clearinghouse, though its automated notifications – like the one that alerted South Carolina to Stormer – went online only late last year, after his hire.

Laura Davis, head of human resources for Asheville schools, said the district has a contract with the nonprofit on hold as details are worked out at the state level.

Like Asheville schools, Buncombe County also was represented on the 2010 teacher ethics and licensing task force by an administrator charged with backgrounding teachers locally.

As with her counterpart McGrattan, Cynthia Lopez, personnel administrator for the county’s school district, was proud of the work of its two dozen members and found herself disappointed that its report was ignored.

Among the 15 recommendations, they sought a revised and expanded application process, a permitting system for teacher assistants and substitutes, ethics training for teachers and reporting requirements for criminal arrests.

But most crucial, Lopez said she would like to see the state conduct fingerprint checks by the North Carolina Board of Education when an educator applies for a license.

“That would establish some uniformity across our state so you know when a teacher went from one system to another, they already had that fingerprint check and the cost of that would be borne by the state,” she said. “It would be something that’s done upfront and early when teachers are licensed. Theoretically, by the time teachers are getting to the school system, you know there’s not something serious on the record.”

As it stands, applying for a North Carolina teaching license requires truthful answers to two background questions posed by the state’s Department of Public Instruction: Has the educator’s license been revoked or suspended in another state and has the applicant been convicted of a crime outside of minor traffic violations.

Prospective teachers who answer “yes” are examined more carefully at the state level. Those that answer “no,” truthful or not, are not investigated by state officials unless suspicion arises though other means, such as a criminal history concern from a local school district.

Background policies, instead, are left to the local districts, which set their own standards. Asheville and Buncombe County use similar procedures that include checks of references, criminal histories run by a private company and sex offender registries.

But as procedures are set locally, they can vary widely. In Charlotte, for example, school administrators are notified through the private backgrounding company when a teacher is arrested in North Carolina, as are the Buncombe and Asheville districts.

Months after he began teaching in Charlotte, Stormer was arrested in Lancaster, South Carolina, for driving with a suspended license. But because that incident happened across the state line, Charlotte school officials would not have received a notification.

Stormer, now 35, also owns a house in Lancaster. He has not responded to a note left there by the Citizen-Times on Feb. 3. Several phone numbers associated with him are disconnected, and in one call, a man who answered said he did not know Stormer.

When she became the staff attorney for the North Carolina State Board of Education in 2008, Katie Cornetto said she realized the state offers a strong case-by-case review system for teachers, including those whose license should be reviewed for issues that don’t merit immediate dismissal, like a drunk driving arrest or ethical violations.

But she also saw a lackluster system for licensure and backgrounding. She pushed for a task force that could pinpoint best practices and potentially move the legislature and funding in a direction that would safeguard children.

It carried the blessing of State Superintendent of Public Schools June Atkinson, but its release was overshadowed by a brutal murder.

Kathy Arnold Taft, 62, who had long served as a member of the State Board of Education, was raped and fatally beaten on March 6, 2010, as she recovered from a surgery at a friend’s home. The suspect, since convicted, lived nearby and is now serving a life sentence for that crime.

On March 9, after Taft was taken off life support, the Department of Public Instruction released statements commemorating her work in education. The next day, the agency sent out a news release on the task force.

Few paid attention. Cornetto recalled that a planned news conference never materialized, as officials were left numb by Taft’s brutal death, and the state’s economy also cast its shadow on the agency’s doorstep.

“The State Superintendent of Public Instruction received the report along with the State Board of Education and it was exactly at the time the most severe cuts in the recession came to our agency and we to date have not recovered from those cuts and additional resources would need to be appropriated from the General Assembly,” Cornetto said.

"With respect to the fingerprinting in particular, the State Board would need legislative authorization to be able to do the fingerprinting from the state level.”

But in the six years that have passed, the department has done little to generate support for an issue that it recognized as a problem.

Carol Vandenbergh, executive director of the Professional Educators of North Carolina, was also a task force member and said she has some concerns about the recommendations. Among them, she said, is if background checks at the state level take too long, it could hamper already beleaguered schools by delaying the arrival of needed educators.

“I’m kind of mixed about all this, because yes, I think it’s positive when you have a little bit of a more rigid system, so you are ensuring the right people are in the classrooms around these children,” she said. “But yet I know we have such a problem recruiting and retaining teachers that any barriers you put on getting teachers into the classroom is something that will be difficult for us to accept.”

The state teaching licensure office remains a two-person force: Cornetto and a paralegal, each of whom has other duties, as well.

She is quick to point out that most of the state’s teachers are hardworking and don’t brush up against ethical or criminal issues.

But Cornetto acknowledges that her agency did not push forward on measures it deemed important, never gathering a needed coalition of lawmakers and those interested in keeping troubled teachers out of North Carolina.

She said she is comfortable with even unflattering attention to the North Carolina education system; better safeguards may follow.

“I am optimistic that with press coverage of this issue, there will be a unified effort at the state and local levels to improve on this system,” Cornetto said. “This might be the most important thing I do in my life.”

An improved system, never enacted

A task force assembled by the Superintendent of North Carolina Public Schools in 2010 produced a report of 15 recommendations to strengthen teacher ethics and licensure. The report was titled “Raising the Bar for North Carolina Teachers” and was intended to bring best practices to the state. None were implemented. Among the recommendations:

Push for legislation authorizing fingerprint background checks at the state level as part of teacher licensing

Finance resources dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of teacher misconduct cases at the state level

Expand the current license application to make it a more effective evaluation tool

Require teacher assistants and substitutes to undergo a licensing or permitting process

Establish initial and continuing ethics training for all education professionals

Support legislation allowing the State Board to share background check information with local schools, and require local school boards to report to the State their findings from any local background checks

Earning an F

As part of a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation into teacher screening systems nationwide, the Asheville Citizen-Times examined hundreds of records of educators from across the country who have had disciplinary actions taken against their licenses and then looked to see whether any of those work in North Carolina today. In some cases, the offenses were relatively minor, such as a teacher breaking a contract in another state to move for work in North Carolina. Others involved offenses teachers disclosed before they were hired. In many cases, however, conflicting and limited personal information made it impossible to positively match identifications. The U.S. has no federal database of problem teachers, leaving states reliant on fragmented and sometimes dysfunctional systems for screening teacher applications

How to look up the background of teachers in every state