At tonight’s meeting of the Rockingham County School Board, District Three Member apparently suggested that the five school board members undergo criminal background checks, though the author would suggest that as creations of statutes, there is no statute that authorizes this under current or pending Virginia law.
No statute in Title 22.1—or elsewhere in the Code of Virginia—extends criminal background check requirements to members of local public school boards. School board members are statutory officers selected by election or appointment, not by employment contract, and the General Assembly has not imposed a consent-to-background-check requirement as a qualification for office.
Under settled principles of Virginia local-government law, a school board possesses only those powers expressly granted by statute or necessarily implied. In the absence of express statutory authorization, a school board may not impose additional qualifications or conditions—such as mandatory background checks on its own members.
The author believes that this may be an attempt to allow people to float disparanging and defamatory attacks against the District Five School Board member to “dirty” that member up so a prior, failed candidate or her apparatchiks to float the same bullshit as they did in the 2023 School Board election.
There is a shitload of questions that needs to be addressed by the cheerleader representing District Three, and I’ll list some of those questions here:
- Tell us all the statutory authority for running background checks on your and your peers.
- Exactly what are you looking for by running background checks on your peers? In other words, tell us all what you’re looking for, otherwise it’s presumed that the electorate vetting the candidates during their respective campaigns was likely sufficient.
- Exactly who would see the results of the background checks once they are accomplished and what would they do with the information?
- If the background checks on your and your peers came back “clear”, would you then seek to have you and your peers “run” through databases controlled by the Virginia Department of Social Services?
- Exactly who would see the results of the VDSS screening once they are accomplished and what would they do with the information?
- If the background checks and screening both came back clear, would you insist on credit reports for you and your peers?
- Perhaps you’d spend taxpayer money to hire a private investigator to go through District and Circuit Court records, perhaps to dig up something as simple has multiple speeding tickets which resulted in numerous dismissals across several jurisdictions by one member, or perhaps divorce records which may indicate behavior which some may consider to be unethical by a school board members. Perhaps simply lying on your application to be endorsed? But then, all of these questions come back to one: who is going to see the background checks and what is going to be done with the information?
In the author’s opinion, perhaps the School Board might pass a policy requiring background checks on their employees on a yearly basis? I was stunned to learn that my wife, a career School Counselor at Spotswood High School had not had a background check since before she was hired by RCPS…some 30-plus years before she retired some years ago, which is odd because everytime I purchase a firearm, I’m background checked. Furthermore, my profession as a Notary Public requires me to submit a background on a yearly basis to maintain my ability to conduct real estate closings, and I can assure you that the $90 I pay annually is significantly more than the $35 or so paid to acquire backgrounds from the Central Criminal Records Exchange for each employee.
This is a waste of School Board time and energy, energy that could be better spent by having our District Three School Board member continue to take self-serving pictures with our District Three Supervisor on the Rockingham County Board of Supervisors, while they shovel snow.
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