Screening Staff and Volunteers: What the Law Requires (and What It Doesn’t)
A background check that satisfies your state’s minimum legal requirement can still miss the exact record that matters most. Organizations run the background check, treat a clean result as proof of due diligence, and move on. Neither the check nor the confidence it produces always holds up the way most leaders assume.
The legal floor differs by state.
There is no single national standard for screening staff and volunteers at youth-serving organizations. States range from detailed, mandatory fingerprint schemes to no specific requirement at all.
California sits at one end. State statutes require a Live Scan fingerprint background check for all administrators, employees, and “regular volunteers,” defined as any adult with direct contact with children for more than 16 hours a month or 32 hours a year. A name-based check alone does not satisfy the requirement.
Pennsylvania’s Child Protective Services Law takes a similar approach, requiring background clearances for anyone who provides care, supervision, guidance, control, or routine interaction with children through employment or volunteer work. The law covers youth-serving organizations broadly, not just schools and licensed facilities.
Georgia sits at the other end. The state does not have a general statute requiring background checks. Instead, it requires checks for specific jobs such as public schools or leaves the decision to state licensing agencies for specific industries such as childcare. Other programs may decide for themselves, although accrediting bodies and the industry standards of care generally require background checks
If your organization operates in more than one state, you cannot assume the standard in your headquarters state covers everyone in your program. Know all the rules for all the states where you operate.
There is no direct line to the FBI.
The federal National Child Protection Act created a legal mechanism that lets qualifying organizations access state and FBI-level criminal history records in limited situations. Most states run this mechanism through a program called VECHS, short for Volunteer and Employee Criminal History System. A qualifying organization applies to a state agency, submits fingerprints, and receives results back through that agency. A private organization cannot call the FBI directly and request a criminal history check on a staff member or volunteer. The request must go through the state-run channel.
What “national” actually means
Leaders often assume a vendor’s “national background check” means a full search of the FBI’s criminal history database. It does not. Unless your organization is one with access to a state-run channel described above, you cannot access FBI records.
Instead, most commercial “national” checks pull from a compiled multi-state database or a state-level repository. These databases aggregate records from participating jurisdictions, but no single database covers every county in the country. County courts hold criminal records, and a search only covers the counties you tell it to search.
A national database search is fast and inexpensive, and it genuinely catches a meaningful share of records. It is not, by itself, a complete criminal history search. Treating it as one creates a gap between what your organization believes and what it actually knows about an applicant.
Ask your vendor these questions.
Two questions matter most. First, how does the vendor identify every state and county an applicant has lived in? The standard tool is a Social Security number trace, which pulls address history and known aliases tied to the number from sources like credit bureaus and lending institutions, typically covering several years back. That trace tells the vendor which jurisdictions to search. Without it, the criminal search only covers the addresses the applicant gave you.
Second, does the vendor verify a hit against the actual court record before reporting it? Aggregated databases catch a great deal, but vendors in this space acknowledge these databases can contain incomplete or outdated information. A hit worth acting on is worth confirming at the source.
A few more questions worth asking directly:
- Does the standard package include criminal searches in every jurisdiction the SSN trace identifies, or is multi-state search a separate add-on?
- Is the vendor compliant with the Fair Credit Reporting Act on disclosure, consent, and adverse action notices? This applies whenever a third party runs the check, including for a volunteer position.
- What is a realistic turnaround time? National database searches typically return same day. A county courthouse search commonly takes 24 to 48 hours, and longer in counties with backlogs.
Ban-the-box laws don’t cancel your screening mandate. They change the timing.
Ban-the-box laws restrict when an employer can ask about a criminal record, not whether the employer can eventually consider a record. Most laws push the criminal history question to later in the hiring process, typically after a conditional offer.
There is no federal ban-the-box law covering private employers. What exists instead is a patchwork of state and local laws, and coverage, timing, and exceptions vary by jurisdiction. Most of these laws carve out an exception for positions involving contact with children or other vulnerable populations. That exception is common, not universal.
California shows how the two layers interact. The state has both a general ban-the-box law, the Fair Chance Act, and AB 506, which specifically requires background checks for youth service organizations. AB 506 does not cancel the Fair Chance Act. An organization still runs the required Live Scan check. The Fair Chance Act requires it to wait to ask about and consider a conviction until after a conditional offer, with an individualized assessment of the record rather than an automatic disqualification.
Check whether your state or city has a ban-the-box law, and whether it exempts youth-serving roles. If it doesn’t, build your hiring sequence so the background check happens where the law allows it, and write your disqualification criteria to call for individualized review rather than an automatic bar.
Decide the hard part before you get a bad report.
A background check only helps your organization if you already know what to do with what it finds. Organizations that end up defending a screening decision rarely have a weak process. More often, they have no process, and someone made a judgment call after a concerning record turned up.
Set your disqualifying-offense criteria before an actual application is in front of you and apply the criteria the same way every time. Ensure that any discretion your organization exercises is uniform and that similar circumstances get similar treatment.
A documented process also protects you when a difficult decision goes right. Suppose an applicant discloses a criminal record, and after reviewing it under your normal processes, your administration decides the offense doesn’t disqualify him or her. Then, later your program fires the employee for unrelated reasons. If the employee sues, you’ll have a strong defense that you followed your documented procedures.
What a background check can’t tell you
Background checks only catch people with a criminal record. They miss first-time offenders and people whose past conduct never reached the criminal justice system. A clean background check does not mean an applicant poses no risk. It means the applicant has no record in the jurisdictions you searched. That gap is why a background check works best as one part of a broader screening process. References, structured interviews, and consistent follow-up on any red flags all catch things a criminal record search cannot.
Information suggesting a person’s tendencies matters, whether it comes from a reference, a prior incident report, or a pattern of boundary-pushing behavior, regardless of what the background check shows. Ignoring a known red flag because the background check came back clean does not make the risk disappear. It just means your organization had the information from a different source and did not act on it.
The bottom line
State law sets a floor. It does not tell you what is safe for your programs, and in many states it does not tell you much at all. Know which states and counties your applicants have lived in. Ask your vendor how they verify what they find. Decide what disqualifies someone before you are looking at an actual record and apply that standard consistently. None of these steps guarantees your organization avoids every risk. But together they put you in a position to show, if you ever have to, that your organization took the risk seriously.
Want to go deeper? Our free courses, Understanding Background Checks and Beyond Background Checks, walk through building a defensible screening policy for your organization, from choosing a vendor to setting disqualification criteria you can apply consistently.
