Saturday, May 15, 2010

Checking the staff

When you have minors in your care it is important to conduct background checks of the staff. Here in Denmark it is mandatory for even sport clubs to conduct such checks.

If you as manager for a facility or a program fail to have a policy about what kind of background checks employees must pass, tragedy might happen. One of our volunteers wrote a piece about recent findings at a boarding school in California:


Outside Los Angeles there was once a boarding school for troubled teenagers.

It was founded by a person who worked with a cult.

He saw a market for toubled teenagers and he took advance of it. The methods used at the cult became the basis for modern so-called treatment of troubled kids across the United States.

The name of this school was CEDU.

Several of the cases we have on our
Missing and wanted page in our Wiki Database are from the CEDU school in California.

Now we are talking of troubled teenagers. Most people would think that the children just ran off like it happened last week in Old Fort, North Carolina where
two girls suddenly were missing from a camp.

But sometimes the truth is so much more awful.

Three kids officially disappeared from CEDU. They were:
John Christopher Inman, Blake Wade Pursley and Daniel Yuen

For many years people believed that they just ran away, but then the police started to investigate a certain
James Lee Crummel. He had unrestricted access to the CEDU campus for decades. Based on evidence in another case he is now locked up, but will we ever learn whether the children made it off campus or their lives were cut short in the boarding school?

We must learn from this case. We must learn not to automaticly assume that a teenager missing is a teenager who has run away.

Background checks is almost impossible to do when you are a private business responsible for making profit to the shareholders. As a boss hiring staff you have to go with your feeling alone and they can trick you.
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