Quote:
Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man
Well, as was the case with the team I mentored, quite often you will have a series of parents who volunteer/donate their time for a single afternoon or only a couple of days out of the whole season (transportation, food, welding, etc). Should these 1-to-3 day people also be required to go through a background check before they can help?
If yes, you're going to make it substantially difficult for some teams to operate. A lot of good intentioned people I know aren't going to go through the trouble for a handful of afternoons.
In other news, how long do you think before HQ addresses (and corrects) the SSN/personal info sharing issue?
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We have a distinction between mentors and parents. There are some parents who sign up as mentors and go through the school's process (which includes a full background check). Those individuals work with students and show up to meetings just like other mentors.
Parents who do not sign up as mentors, on the other hand, avoid the background checks. They do not come to meetings and work with kids like the mentors do. They do come to provide lunch on Saturday's, and we'll sometimes get a group of them for a small dedicated project (building field elements, building tables or rolling cabinets for the pit, etc)... but those projects are separate from the team functioning, and generally do not include student involvement. If students are involved, it's either with their own parent involved, or with a mentor directly involved as well.
I don't know of
any youth organization that requires parents to have background checks if the parent is simply involved as a parent. If a parent is involved as a coach, then yes, they often are required.
The key with this sort of distinction is that the team is structured so that an appropriate mentor, one that has gone through the background check and training, is present to supervise anyone that has not gone through those steps. And at least for us, there are often times/meetings where the primary and secondary contacts for the team are not present. We need to have others there that have gone through the same training and are trusted at the same level by the school and parents, and having a background check helps develop that trust for a new mentor.