Tax credits for property owners who install security cameras. Electronic tracking devices for children to wear. Signs designating storefronts as “safe havens” for lost kids.A number of child-safety proposals have been floated in the wake of the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood.
One proposal might stand out to New York State residents as a commonsense initiative: mandatory background checks and fingerprinting for private school employees.
Should Yeshiva Staff Face Mandatory Fingerprinting?
Tax credits for property owners who install security cameras. Electronic tracking devices for children to wear. Signs designating storefronts as “safe havens” for lost kids.A number of child-safety proposals have been floated in the wake of the murder of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky in Brooklyn’s Boro Park neighborhood.
One proposal might stand out to New York State residents as a commonsense initiative: mandatory background checks and fingerprinting for private school employees.
The checks would not have prevented the murder of Kletzky. Accused killer Levi Aron, also a Jew from Boro Park, abducted the boy off the street in July as the child walked home from a neighborhood summer camp. But advocates contend that such regulation would codify one lesson of the murder: that Orthodox communities can no longer place blind trust in their own.
“The point that we bring to the table is that we Jews can’t do it ourselves,” said Elliot Pasik, president of the Jewish Board of Advocates for Children. “We can’t self-govern. We can’t police ourselves. We need laws for child safety.”
Only one Jewish private school out of hundreds in the state has opted into a program to fingerprint prospective employees, state records show.
Pasik’s organization has set forth a legislative agenda to apply public school safety measures to yeshivas and, by extension, to all private schools in New York State. In addition to mandatory fingerprint testing and criminal background checks for all religious school employees, Pasik has called for laws that would force private school officials to report in-school abuse to secular authorities and to register teachers with the State Education Department. Pasik’s plan would also force them to create school safety plans and to place defibrillators in each institution, among other mandates.
“The religious school world is a legal no-man’s-land,” Pasik said. “The child protection laws that we are proposing are totally neutral. They don’t affect the religion clause of the First Amendment. They are as neutral as a building code or clean bathrooms or anything else.”
Even so, Pasik and other child advocates have not yet brought these proposals to pass. Pasik’s most recent call for legislation, — which he sent to six New York State senators and Assembly members, including Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in the wake of the Kletzky murder — is only the latest act in a decadelong crusade to regulate Jewish private schools.
In 2000, the New York State Assembly passed the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act, known as Project Save. Partially a response to the Columbine High School massacre, which had occurred the previous year, Project Save put into place a series of regulations to protect students and teachers. It also mandated background checks and fingerprinting for new public school employees, and forced teachers and school officials to report any abuse that they suspect is taking place on school grounds.
According to Pasik, religious organizations successfully fought to exempt private schools from the law.
In a telephone interview with the Forward, Rabbi David Zwiebel, executive vice president of the Orthodox umbrella organization Agudath Israel of America, said that he did not recall whether his group weighed in on the bill at the time.
“We might have said — not necessarily to the legislature — that we appreciate when the state allows us to do things voluntarily rather than forces us to do something,” Zwiebel said.
In 2006, Agudath Israel voiced its support for a bill passed by the legislature that allowed — but did not order — religious schools to opt into the state’s fingerprinting program.
The organization took no official position on a subsequent proposal that would have made fingerprinting mandatory for private schools. This bill, which was sponsored by Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, a Democrat from Long Beach, and Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat serving Boro Park, among other lawmakers, failed to pass the legislature in 2009.
Last year, Pasik filed a Freedom of Information request with the State Education Department, and found that just 17 private schools — out of a total of about 1,900 — enrolled in the fingerprint program. Only one school on the list was a Jewish private school: the North Shore Hebrew Academy High School.
This came as no surprise to Ben Hirsch, president of Survivors for Justice, a child-safety advocacy organization and support group for victims of abuse in the Orthodox community.
“For decades, our community’s leadership has been protecting pedophiles,” Hirsch said. “This is going to sound shocking, but the safest place for a sex offender to reside is within the Hasidic and strictly Orthodox community, employed as a teacher.”
Though Orthodox communities are finally showing signs of confronting the issue of abuse, Jewish education groups reject the notion that yeshivas are soft targets for pedophiles.
“We are aware of abuse. It is a serious issue not just for the Jewish communities, but for all communities” said Rabbi Martin Schloss of the Jewish Education Project, which advocates on behalf of 370 Jewish private schools. “We are working with organizations that teach children about appropriate and inappropriate touch, and we consider our teachers the frontline defense systems for picking up signs of abuse.”
Even so, Hikind said it is high time that the mandatory fingerprint law, which he plans to sponsor again next year, is passed. The Kletzky murder, he suspects, might even propel the community of Boro Park and the broader Hasidic leadership to back him this time.
“I think now, with everything that has gone on, there is greater recognition that more has to be done,” Hikind said. “It’s about priming. It should have been done years ago. A lot of things should have been done years ago.”
Zwiebel, for his part, said that Agudath Israel is going to take a wait-and-see approach. “I am pretty sure we will not oppose it and we will discuss internally as to whether we will affirmatively encourage it,” he said.
Fingerprinting
Anyone in social service has to be fingerprinted, why shouldn’t teachers
a mother
i think the fingerprinting would be a great idea – however — how mamy of the Rabbaim have ever been charged — you never know what lurks behind closed dores.
i can name about 12 that i know of from when my kids were in school who did stuff to out children and nothing was or to date has been done and they are still teaching – this goes from just a slap on the butt to actual physical touching –
its about time we – community take a stand –
Moshe Ben-Levi
yes it’s a great idea thats way overdue….
Get printed and background checks – or don’t get hired. (maybe even charge the applicant a partial fee…)
problem is: must of the frum sex crimes go unreported – but none the less we can see other stuff as well on the reports.
Bill
YES YES YES…EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A BACKGROUND CHECK!
Concerned parent
In Washington State, all teachers have to be fingerprinted. Even the volunteer parent who help on field trips or in the classroom. I thought it was mandatory everywhere. Now that I know it isn’t, I wish it was as well as the mandatory background check!!
LA Morah
dear mother,
so why don’t you and some of the other moms do something about it? seriously!
Anything to Protect
In England all teachers, camp counselors… must have a criminal background check – what’s taking the USA so long?
ch mother
why not? if you have nothing to hide?
CH MOTHER #2
WELL WELL WHEN THERE IS THERE A RUMOR IN YOUR SCHOOL FROM A STUDENT OR A PARENT PLEASE PLEASE TEACHERS, PRINCIPALS AND ROSHEI YESHIVA, IN GIRLS LIKE IN BOYS SCHOOLS DO NOT AGAIN DO NOT CLOSE YOUR EARS AND EYES, LISTEN TO THE PARENT OR CHILD. DO NOT FOR THE SAKE OF THE TEACHER’S PARNASSA KEEP HIM IN YOUR SCHOOL TODAY YOU WILL BE REPORTED TO THE AUTORITIES WITHOUT PAROLE! YOU, THE MOLESTER AND YOUR PRINCIPAL COVERING UP FOR YOU OR AFRAID TO LOOSE YOU FOR HIS SELFISH REASONS AS ALSO A RELATIVE, G-D FORBID IS MOSSAR… TODAY WITHOUT RACHMANUS IS TO REPORT TO THE AUTORITIES. PLZ AS WE ALL KNOWN THEY PICK PUR NESHAMOS INNOCENT FRAGILE AND DESTROY THEM FOR LIFE. I WILL KILL YOU ALIVE! WITHOUT PAROLE.
Crown Heightser
It seems as some of you are uninformed and this article may just be a bit misleading as all teachers and school staff, in all Crown Heights yeshivahs (and i would imagine that the same is with the girl schools) have complete background checks when taking a job and every 2 years thereafter.
If they have anything to do with any special government program, like headstart or day care, they get fingerprinted too.
TO A MOTHER (#2) who “can name about 12 that i know of… who did stuff to out children… and they are still teaching” – i find this hard to believe – if it is true, you would be the one at fault for not speaking up against them.
Masera Problem
What happens to illeagal imagrant teachers, or teachers who have a warent for suspended licence, or teachers who went through a divorce where the wife makes up a story of chiald abuse? This happens every day.
to # 11
you ask, “What happens to illegal immigrant teachers, or teachers who have a warrant for suspended licence?” Personally, I don’t want someone like that teaching my kids.
What? I need my kids to learn that it’s ok to drive with suspended licenses? Or to break the law in other ways? Feh! I think our main problem is that we tolerate non G-d-fearing teachers in the first place. Get rid of all of them, and hire only teachers the Rebbe would approve of.
shlomo
in Argentina 100 years m.b. more all citizens have fingerprint in passport. all visitors in usa have it . what problems?
p.s. how it can help i child abuse?
from there
All the frum schools in Chicago have mandatory fingerprinting, for 3 years now.
Sound good but...
While this sounds like a great idea, it will probably face constitutional problems as the state cannot force a private institution to anything it wants. The only ones who can force a school to do anything are the students and their parents. They are the ones the school works for and it is to their demands that the schools must comply. Though there are always way to avoid the law, if parents start moving their children to schools where this is implemented, other schools will immediately implement it as well in order not to lose more students. And on the other hand, if parents are happy not to have the school their child attends enroll in this program, then that should be their decision to make and the state should not be allowed to interfere with that choice.
Gilrs get hurt too!
All the focus seems to be on men attacking boys. I am a young women who was molested by a lady teacher. It started with some very explicit talk and ended with many times of intimate touch under the clothes. I know first hand that nnyone can be a molester, even the older married lady! It’s not just boys who are victims!!