An Administrator's Guide to California Private School Law

Chapter 3 – Hiring

carefully to ensure that the applicant has completed and signed the application.

2. D ECIDE W HO W ILL C ONDUCT T HE B ACKGROUND C HECK During the early stages of the recruitment process, schools should decide whether background investigations will be performed in-house or by an outside investigator. Schools should designate a specific person, e.g., division head, business officer, or human resources, to perform background investigations in-house. In-house investigators should be aware of the legal restrictions on conducting background checks. Although many private schools do not hire outside investigators to conduct background checks, schools should be aware of the technical issues involved in the event that they do so. LCW Practice Advisor

Schools that decide to hire an outside investigator to conduct background investigations should verify that the outside investigator is licensed before hiring the investigator. 127 Employers may verify investigator licenses by accessing the website of the California Bureau of Security & Investigative Services: http://www.bsis.ca.gov Schools should establish a centralized procedure for providing candidates with any required disclosures, notices, election forms, waivers, authorizations and releases for background information. Consider providing the necessary materials concurrently with the job application packet. Doing so allows schools to easily and quickly establish, upon request, that they provided applicants the required materials and that applicants have signed the election forms, waivers, authorizations and releases.

LCW Practice Advisor

3. O BTAIN A S IGNED W AIVER A ND A UTHORIZATION A comprehensive, signed written waiver and authorization is essential to any successful background check. The waiver/authorization should inform the applicant of the types of information that the school will seek from former and current employers. It should require the applicant to release the school and current and former employers from liability arising from the background investigation. The document should also require the applicant to authorize access to and/or to obtain a copy of his or her personnel file. The authorization is necessary to obtain missing employment information when the applicant is reluctant to have the school contact his or her current or former employers. 4. D ETERMINE W HICH C ANDIDATES W ILL B E I NVESTIGATED Schools must next decide which candidates will be investigated. Depending on the circumstances, as a rule of thumb, a school should check the references of the top two or three

An Administrator’s Guide to California Private School Law ©2019 Liebert Cassidy Whitmore 57