Toronto District School Board seeks approval for background checks for all school volunteers

A warning to parents in Toronto: if you want to chaperone your kid's field trip to the zoo, you may soon be subjected to a criminal-background check.

If today's proposal is approved, the Toronto District School Board will require all school volunteers to get clearance from the police.

Yes, everyone. Even pizza-lunch supervisors and library helpers.

Teachers and volunteer coaches already go through the "vulnerable sector screening," as they have greater contact with the students.

The school board currently has 35,000 volunteers. That's a lot of paperwork. And while the fee is currently $15 for a background check, police are considering a fee hike — to $20 — to help them address a backlog. The background checks take eight to 12 weeks. If the police don't get enough information, they ask for fingerprints, too.

Volunteers would require a new check every four years.

Eglinton-Lawrence trustee Howard Goodman told the Globe and Mail that in his decade on the board, he can't recall a single incident with a volunteer.

In an email intended to elicit feedback from constituents, he acknowledged that the policy would likely lead to a decrease in parental involvement.

"How would you feel if you weren't allowed to help supervise your child's field trip because you weren't able to get a criminal background check on time?" he wrote. "If you stopped volunteering, how would that affect your ability to communicate effectively with your child's teacher or the school's principal?"

School board spokeswoman Shari Schwartz-Maltz admitted that problems with volunteers "very rarely" occur, "but who wants to take that risk? That parent could be with a kid for a couple of minutes, and that's really all it takes."

"We have a duty to protect kids," she said.

The proposed rule stems from a situation not even involving a school. When five-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin died after being mistreated by his grandparents at his Toronto home, schools were urged to be on the lookout for signs of child abuse and neglect.

Mandatory criminal-background checks is just one of the recommendations that came out of the inquest into the young boy's death.

But is a background check really going to help create a safer environment? Or is it simply an overreaction — like banning cartwheels, balls and tag on the playground to prevent injury, or locking school doors to prevent another Newton shooting?

Besides, not every abuser has a criminal record that would interfere with their ability to volunteer. (Did Jeffrey Baldwin's grandparents have criminal records?)

Goodman told the Globe and Mail that dozens of parents emailed him, concerned that the background-check proposal would discourage people from volunteering and hurt the relationships parents have with their children's schools.

Another concern is that the checks create another stumbling block for immigrant parents.

"They may lack skill in English or simply feel uncomfortable in a new environment. If they come from corrupt or authoritarian countries where the police are viewed with suspicion, the prospect of a police check could make the idea of volunteering especially daunting," wrote the Globe and Mail's Marcus Gee.

What do you think? Will demanding a police check from all volunteers boost safety or just hurt parent-school relations? Share your thoughts in the comments below.