We have received several inquiries from people as to the safety of our children involved in sport and community leagues. Is it standard practice for your leaders and coaches to be screened through the interview processes, given background checks, or physically attend specified trainings at your agency? We know that some groups require this on their own without agency requests, but many work on tight budgets and do not devote the resources to such risk management practices.
Sound risk management practices call for park and recreation agencies to run background checks and conduct training on a variety of topics for their employees and volunteers. This covers most individuals that are involved with agencies; however, there are a large group of individuals connected to agencies that do not fall under this umbrella. This gap could potentially lead to our children being coached and watched after by less than desirable people.
What about the variety of sport and community leagues that utilize agency fields and facilities? They have volunteer leaders and coaches. Most members of the community associate these leaders and coaches with their local park and recreation agency as this is where they interact with these individuals.
So who really is watching our children? Do you know?
Please share your policies and procedures on screening job applicants and volunteers at your agency. What have been the positive and negative impacts of such developed policies and procedures? Your feedback could really help guide other agencies and keep our children safe.
Why take a risk? We have been doing background checks on ALL potential volunteers and employees. Rarely do any come back with a hit, but once in a while one will come up with something on it to investigate further.
I think that we need to focus on a national background check process and not just in Illinois. Criminals don’t travel across state lines? I also think we sould try to negotiate a discount price of these background check via our Association. It is very costly, but the price tag is so small in comparison to what could happen.
We have been doing background checks on Park District Volunteers and we also require our affiliate groups to get background checks on all of their coaches and other volunteers
There are some great resources available for agencies to utilize. The Positive Coaching Alliance has provided a variety of resources to the IPRA Resource Library (simply log in on website to view - under Athletics category).
These resources include coach evaluations for parents and athletes to complete; agreements between coaches and parents on how to work together; agendas and notes for creating Parent meeting agendas.
In addition, they also have free resources available on their website: http://www.positivecoach.org/default.aspx