Missoula County Public Schools employee Trichelle Keith guides school volunteer Lindsey Green through a series of fingerprint scans in a white-walled room. Green has two kids in the district and has been helping out for years.
This is the first time she’s had to undergo fingerprinting. The process took Green about 10 minutes.
“I think it’s fine,” Green told MTPR afterward. “I think whatever we can do to keep our kids safe is worth it.”
State lawmakers broadened requirements for school volunteer background checks last year in an effort to protect students. That left some districts scrambling to comply with the new rules, and others with few changes to make.
Missoula County Public Schools Executive Director of Human Resources & Labor Relations Trevor Laboski says the district previously did name-based background checks for volunteers. Those are less rigorous and much cheaper than fingerprinting. The new law prompted the district to hire part-time staff to fingerprint its pool of roughly 5,000 volunteers before any of them could help in the classroom this fall.
In all, Missoula schools spent more than $20,000 per month this school year to comply with the law. The district didn’t know the expense was coming when it formed its budget.
“Missoula has a very large budget, just by the nature of the size of the organization, but whenever you don’t know you’re going to incur a cost like that, it’s significant,” Laboski told MTPR.
A spokesperson for Helena Public Schools told MTPR the district was already fingerprinting volunteers before the new law and didn’t incur new costs. Bozeman schools have volunteers pay for their own prints. The Montana Department of Justice charges $30 per background check.
The law requiring volunteer fingerprinting didn’t come with any additional funding for schools.
