Posted: 4/25/07
Final Draft - by Cliff Buchan
Don’t penalize volunteers for wanting to help
If you read Sen. John Marty’s column last week on school funding and the need in many districts for drives to collect soup labels and cereal box tops, you probably thought of Forest Lake.
There can’t be many districts in the state who can beat the Forest Lake area for the contribution of those labels and box tops and all the other avenues that pour badly needed dollars into the public school system.
This is not to argue that Marty is right or wrong. But the column does point to something that everyone should agree on.
That would be the value of volunteers.
By and large, the parent-teacher associations and parent-teacher organizations that serve the district are made up of many hard-working volunteers and their kids. These are the little engines that help drive the schools through fund-raising school carnivals, candy sales and other efforts.
Each month the ISD 831 School Board sets aside time to thank those groups and the volunteers and students who literally raise thousands of dollars to support programs and activities — even equipment and supplies — that the school district does not fund. The reliance on such auxiliary fund-raising efforts is habit-forming.
That’s why it can be hoped that the board’s policy making committee and the full school board come to a reasonable plan in the implementation of a new policy setting up guidelines for criminal background checks for many of the district’s volunteers.
The idea of such a policy is easily defended. It is only right to make sure kids are in good hands.
But much remains to be answered as to who is given a criminal background check, how often the check is required and who pays the cost.
It should be the policy committee’s decision to iron out those details in a fair and clean fashion, but when it comes to the cost, there needs to be only one source.
When it comes to volunteers, it should be the school district that steps in to cover this cost — be it $2 or $20. Sharing the cost is not the answer that I can support.
It would be highly disingenuous of any notion that the entire cost of the background check be paid by the volunteer with no school district contribution. That is equally wrong.
In a time in the existence of the district when it must rely on parents, staff, kids and volunteers to raise thousands upon thousands of dollars, it isn’t right that some of those same volunteers are told they will have to pay in order to volunteer.
School programs need volunteers. It should be the district’s obligation to find the funds to implement the policy that it feels will best protect students but yet not result in a slap in the face to those parents who deserve to be thanked, not sent a bill for wanting to do what is right.
Forest Lake Times
P.O. Box 218
880 SW 15 St.
Forest Lake, MN 55025
651-464-4601
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