Waiting for Their Prints

Kristina Crump has waited all her adult life for the moment she would teach in her own classroom.

Single motherhood, even her child’s bout with cancer, didn’t stop her from earning her teaching credential and, last month, securing her first assignment in a Ventura school.

But a technicality could keep her from being there the first day of school to greet her sixth-grade class--namely her fingerprints.

With a new state law requiring fingerprint checks--and a logjam in Sacramento--Crump is among dozens of school employees in Ventura County awaiting final clearance.

Until the results come in, schools in Ventura, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo could be forced to use substitute teachers.

“I want to be here on the first day of school,” Crump, 29, said Thursday while posting in her classroom a large poster that read, “You never know what you can do until you try.”

“I’m getting everything ready and planning everything,” the Camarillo resident said. “And now someone else is going to be there doing my job? This is what I was hired to do and what I love to do.”

Ten months ago, a law was enacted requiring school districts to obtain complete fingerprint reports before hiring applicants for teaching and nonteaching jobs. The law came in the wake of the rape and slaying of a student near Sacramento, allegedly by a school janitor with a violent criminal record unknown to school officials.

Local school officials blame the backlog on the delay in receiving optical fingerprint scanners. The scanners--which instantly transmit digitized fingerprints over phone lines to the state--arrived in the county only last week, and many school districts do not yet have access to the machines.

When using the “live scan” machines, replies arrive by computer within 72 hours, rather than what can be a monthlong wait when the district mails the prints to the state Department of Justice.

On Thursday, the Ventura Unified School District was waiting for 15 fingerprint results for teachers alone. A dozen fingerprint cards were still pending for teachers at the Conejo Valley Unified School District. The Pleasant Valley School District reported 11 outstanding prints for teachers.

Other districts throughout the county were hoping that none of their teachers suddenly quit or took leaves of absences--or they would be facing the same dilemma.

“We’re keeping our fingers crossed,” said a spokeswoman at Moorpark Unified School District. “If we have to do any more last-minute hiring, we might have a problem.”

Although two of the live-scan machines are set up at the Sheriff’s Department offices in Ventura and Thousand Oaks, district officials are still completing the paperwork that will give them account numbers for the computer system.

“This will be a one-time anomaly,” said Jerry Dannenberg, Ventura’s assistant superintendent of human resources. “It’s taken the state awhile to get everything hooked up.”

The legislation called for the Justice Department to create the statewide computer system.

Mike Van Winkle, a Justice Department spokesman, said 100 of the machines will be installed in the state’s 58 counties by the end of fall.

Ventura County received its two machines only last week because larger counties--such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego--were given higher priority.

“We went in order of population, and Ventura was somewhere in the middle,” Van Winkle said. “The bill was signed 10 months ago, and it took us eight months to get the first terminal. We didn’t get the first machines until mid-June. The state bureaucratic process . . . takes time.”

The $50,000 machines took a long while to manufacture.

“It’s not like they are at Staples, just waiting to be picked up,” he added.

The problem with getting fingerprint clearance before September is not confined to Ventura, Van Winkle said. Some of the state’s 1,100 school districts tried to avoid the wait by purchasing their own machines.

“We’ve had at least 30 orders from districts that didn’t want to wait until their sheriff’s departments hooked up the scanner,” Van Winkle said.

Simi Valley Unified School District officials said they hired more teachers than necessary in anticipation of the delay. So did the Oxnard School District.

“It was kind of risky,” said David Gomez, Oxnard’s assistant superintendent of personnel. “What if you have an excess of teachers, you still have to pay them. As it turned out, we’re right on the money.”

On Thursday morning, Pleasant Valley School District officials got the green light from Sacramento to use the live scan machine. They rushed 15 newly hired employees, including a vice principal, to the Sheriff’s Department.

Classes in the Camarillo-area district begin Monday.

Steve Hanke, Pleasant Valley’s assistant superintendent of certificate personnel, said if the results are not in by today, he’ll have to plug in substitutes on Monday.

Teachers were not too happy with that possibility.

“We should be in our rooms, preparing for our kids, not here waiting to be fingerprinted,” said Katy Du Mosch, a newly hired speech and language therapist, sitting in the lobby of the Sheriff’s Department. “But at least the service is here and we’ll be starting on Monday--at least we hope so.”