The Problem
Every few weeks another story breaks. A teacher or coach with a documented history of inappropriate conduct toward a student. Hired by a new school or college that never knew. Sometimes the warning signs were in a personnel file the new employer never asked for. Sometimes an investigation was underway and the employee simply resigned before it finished. Leaving no formal finding for anyone to disclose. Sometimes the law on the books simply did not require anyone to check.
This is not a hypothetical. It happened in our own district. Shoreline Community College hired a former Henry M. Jackson High School physics teacher. Who had resigned from Everett Public Schools. While under investigation for a years long inappropriate relationship with a student. Shoreline never called the high school. State law did not require it to. Washington's 2020 disclosure law. The first of its kind in the nation. Required colleges to check with other colleges. Not with K-12 districts.
A national review of all 50 states found that. North Carolina requires no background check and no fingerprinting for teachers at all. Leaving it entirely to individual school boards. Some of which may require nothing. New Jersey passed one of the country's broadest "pass the harasser" laws in 2018. It’s own state watchdog found in 2024 that the law was "insufficient, easily manipulated ." With no agency assigned to oversee it and no standardized way. To verify the findings the law was supposed to track. Higher education is worse. Most states have no disclosure law at all. Screening is left entirely to individual college policy.
The common thread in every one of these failures is the same. A state passes a law. Nobody is responsible for checking whether it's followed. The next time anyone finds out is when a reporter asks questions.
Why the Current Federal Approach Doesn't Work
Congress already tried to address this in 2015. With a provision of the Every Student Succeeds Act. It requires states to have some policy against helping a school employee with a known history of misconduct get hired elsewhere. It has no enforcement mechanism. The Department of Education does not even track which states comply. As of a few years after the law passed. The overwhelming majority of states had no real plan to implement it.
The only national database that exists. The NASDTEC Clearinghouse , is privately run by a voluntary association of state licensing boards. States report into it voluntarily. On their own schedule. With their own level of diligence. A national investigation found thousands of disciplined teachers are missing from it. Including over a thousand whose licenses had been permanently revoked. Participation is voluntary because there has never been a federal requirement to participate.
What Already Works and What's Missing
Some states have built real systems. Pennsylvania's Act 168 passed in 2014 is the strongest model in the country. It requires a hiring institution to formally request misconduct history from an applicant's current employer . And every prior employer where the applicant had contact with children. Employers have 20 days to respond. If they disclose anything concerning 60 days to provide full detail. Pennsylvania is the only state that actually penalizes a former employer who fails to respond. With civil penalties and real consequences. Every other state's law depends on the goodwill of an institution that often has every incentive to stay quiet.
What Pennsylvania's law does not do “ because no state law can “ is follow a teacher across state lines. Or reach a college hiring someone out of a K-12 job in a different state entirely. Or guarantee that an investigation interrupted by a resignation still gets recorded somewhere a future employer will see it. That is a job for the federal government. Only the federal government can build a system that works the same way in all fifty states.
The Proposal: A National School Safety Clearance
This bill creates a School Safety Clearance . A federal safety eligibility determination for every teacher, administrator, coach, and staff member with regular access to students. In K-12 and higher education public and private. It is built on a model that already exists and already works. The federal personnel security clearance system used for every employee who handles classified national security information.
That system works because it separates two questions that are too often conflated. The military decides who is qualified to serve. A separate federal process decides who can be trusted with classified material. The same split applies here. States keep complete control over teaching licenses and certification. Nothing in this bill touches who is qualified to teach a subject or run a classroom. The School Safety Clearance answers a narrower separate question. Has this person been the subject of a substantiated finding of sexual misconduct or abuse? Anywhere in the country in any school or college job ever?
How It Would Work
Every teacher and staff member submits fingerprints. Social Security number and a photograph once at hire. Those identifiers are then run every year against criminal, sex offender, child abuse and investigation databases. So that any new charge, complaint or investigation is caught automatically. This is the same continuous vetting model the federal government already uses for security clearances. Processed through the FBI's existing fingerprint infrastructure rather than building something new from scratch.
A new office inside the FBI. Leveraging the Bureau's existing fingerprint and criminal records systems. Maintains a single national registry of every covered employee's clearance status. Built and operated the way the Defense Department's central clearance database already operates today.
Every school and college must report within five business days. Every hire, every termination, every resignation. The start of every misconduct investigation and its outcome.
If an employee resigns or is fired while an investigation is still open. The school must still report it. Including the fact that the investigation was never finished because the person left first. That single requirement would have caught the Shoreline case. It is the most direct response to exactly what happened here.
A college or K-12 district hiring someone from any other school or college . Anywhere in the country in any sector. Must check this registry and request disclosure from every employer where the applicant had contact with children. Not just employers in the same sector. Closing the exact loophole that let Shoreline hire from Everett without ever picking up the phone.
Institutions that fail to report or that knowingly stay silent when asked. Lose federal education funding and face direct civil penalties. Up to $100,000 per violation. Closing the enforcement gap that left Washington's and New Jersey's laws unenforced for years.
Why This Belongs in Congress Not Just Olympia
Washington was the first state in the nation to pass a disclosure law like this in 2020. We should be proud of that. But being first does not mean the job is done. A state by state patchwork will always have the same flaw. It stops at the state line. A teacher who loses a job in Washington can still be hired in Idaho if Idaho never asks. A college in California has no obligation to call a high school in Texas.
This is not a problem any single state can solve. It is exactly the kind of problem the federal government exists to solve. And exactly the kind of problem Congress has solved before. With the same legal tool already used in this space. Tying federal education funding to compliance. The same lever ESSA already uses. Just with a database an enforcement office. And real penalties behind it this time.
We protect our children or we explain to the next parent why we didn't.
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