LITTLE ROCK — State officials plan to expand the list of college employees who must report suspected sexual abuse of children to nearly everyone who works on campus, including coaches, legislators heard Tuesday.
The planned change comes in the wake of a sex abuse scandal at Penn State. Former Penn State football assistant Jerry Sandusky is charged with sexually assaulting 10 boys over a decade, some of them on the university campus. Longtime Penn State head coach Joe Paterno was fired for not doing enough to prevent the abuse.
Last month, as the news broke, state officials told legislators that college coaches, presidents or other employees of higher education institutions in the state were not specifically listed in the Child Maltreatment Act of 2009, which details who is require to report such abuse.
Shane Broadway, interim director of the state Department of Higher Education, told a joint meeting of the House and Senate committees on children and youth Tuesday that officials at his agency and the Department of Human Services have met several times recently to discuss the 2009 act and how it can be improved.
DHS is now rewriting the regulations for the Child maltreatment Act to include an expanded definition of “school officials,” subject to approval by the Legislative Council, Broadway said. He said higher education officials also have met with college officials to inform them of the law, and that DHS officials gave a presentation on the law to a conference of college and university trustees recently.
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“You can have all the rules and statutes that you want, but certainly training is going to be important in this,” he said.
Sen. Sue Madison, D-Fayetteville, told Broadway she hopes the definition of school official does not “hinge over having authority or employees.”
“Just assure me that it will cover an athletic trainer, an assistant professor who is trusted by one of his students … that it is not just restricted to supervising employees,” she said.
Broadway said the new wording being considered includes “any person authorized by school to exercise administrative or supervisory authority over employees, students or agents of the school.”
He said volunteers “exercising administrative or supervisory authority in a program conducted by the school shall also be considered a school official.”
Rep. Kim Hammer, R-Benton, suggested a simpler definition.
“If they draw a paycheck from the school they ought to be a mandated reporter,” he said.
Also during the meeting, Stephanie Smith, regional director of the National Child Protection Training Center located on the campus of NorthWest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, discussed the importance of educating people on child abuse, how to detect it and report it.
She said the center has developed a child advocacy curriculum that is being used in a number of colleges and universities around the country, including NWAC and Arkansas State University. Several studies have concluded that a high percentage of people fail to report suspected child abuse because of poor on-the-job training, she said.
“We have not been training people who are going into mandated professions what they need to know at the undergraduate level,” she said. “We have not been training them in college how to recognize and respond to abuse, and we have not been doing a good job universally of providing backup support to them when they get out in the field.”