FDLE SHARED SCHOOL RESULTS SYSTEM

Jessica Lunsford Act - Criminal History Sharing Among School Districts

FDLE was asked by the Legislature to implement a system to allow for criminal historyinformation provided to a school district to be shared with other school districts. This system hasbeen developed by FDLE and was made available to school districts on September 30. The system wasdeveloped in order to give the districts an automated option for sharing criminal historyinformation with other school districts. However, school districts are not mandated to use thissystem and may have other local policy that applies.

The Law:

Under provisions of the Jessica Lunsford Act passed during the 2005 Legislative Session, schooldistricts are required to conduct level 2 background screenings on instructional andnon-instructional personnel and contractors who have direct contact with students or have access toschool grounds when children are present. Section 1012.465, Florida Statutes.

Issue Raised:

The main issue raised has related to the portion of the legislation that pertains to“contractors” who have access to school grounds when children are present. Manycontractors work at multiple school districts concurrently and it was cost prohibitive andlogistically difficult to have to submit fingerprints to each district within a contemporaneoustimeframe.

FDLE Solution:

FDLE developed the Florida Shared School Results system (FSSR).

--The FSSR is a secondary site where criminal history record results requested via submission ofa fingerprint by one school district will be posted and will be available to public schoolsincluding university schools.

--The FSSR has criminal history results posted from September 20th forward.

--Upon request, criminal history results posted between August 1, 2005 and September 20, 2005will be reposted manually by the FDLE to the FSSR.

--The criminal history results will be posted for 90 days. School districts can still share thecriminal history record manually if after 90 days old.

--The school districts maintain the ability to make hiring decisions, but the FSSR provides themthe option of utilizing a previously run criminal history record rather than submitting a newfingerprint and receiving another criminal history record.

--School districts that do not submit prints to FDLE and use the FSSR for hiring decisions willnot receive notice of any subsequent Florida arrests. Only the school district that submitted thefingerprint which this record is based on will receive subsequent arrest hit notifications.

The Concept:

A vendor has contracts to provide database support for School District A, B and C. The contractis for one year.

--The vendor is fingerprinted by School District A and the prints are sent to FDLE.

--FDLE runs the prints against the state and national criminal history repositories and poststhe results for School District A to access.

--At the same time, FDLE posts the results sent to School District A on the FSSR for any of theother districts to utilize (automating the ability to share the record)

--School District B and C can access the FSSR.

--The results will be posted on FSSR for 90 days.

--If the same vendor gets a fourth contract with another School District six months later, thatSchool District will reprint and send the fingerprints to FDLE and the process will start again --the results will be posted for 90 days for other districts to use as well.