The Fall Festival Problem: When Background Checks Can’t Reach Everyone

Picture a church fall festival on a late-October Saturday. Within an hour of opening, about 400 people fill the parking lot, many of them neighborhood families the staff has never met. A parent volunteer runs the cakewalk, and a visiting youth group paints faces near the playground. The church’s policy says to “screen every adult who works with children,” but almost nobody here has gone through a background check.

Background checks at public events can’t do the job they do for staff and regular volunteers. Most youth-serving organizations know that. Far fewer have a written plan for what to do instead.

Where “Screen Every Adult” Breaks Down

In my experience, organizations hear “screen everyone who works with kids” and stretch it to cover every adult on the property. There’s actually no standard requiring that level of screening. In 2007, the CDC issued prevention guidelines for youth-serving organizations (I’m a bit biased because I was part of the pre-publication review team). They tell organizations to screen applicants for positions that involve contact with youth, and to screen more rigorously as a role’s autonomy grows.

That standard works for staff and regular volunteers. It stops working once the gates open. A fall festival puts three kinds of adults near your children that your normal process never touches:

• Day-of volunteers: Parents and one-time helpers often show up the morning of the event and skip the application entirely. A 2015 Australian government review of screening practices flagged parent volunteers whose child is present as a known gap.
• Other organizations’ people: A visiting youth group, a vendor, or a contractor running the inflatables answers to someone else’s screening process, if there even is one.
• The public: Families, neighbors, and strangers walk in without any screening at all.  After all, that’s the point of an open event.

What Background Checks at Public Events Can’t Do

Screening looks backward. It finds a record only if one exists, and most of the time no record exists.

A 2008 study reviewed more than 170,000 sex offense charges in New York. In over 94% of child molestation arrests, the person had no prior sex offense conviction. The 2007 CDC guidelines make the same point in plain words: background checks miss most offenders because most have not yet been caught.

That’s why we recommend using supervision when you can’t screen everyone. Supervision works in the present. A watching adult catches the boundary violation as it happens, along with the adult who steers a child away from the group. It also catches the helper who keeps finding reasons to be alone with one particular child. Supervision works the same way whether that adult passed a background check or never filled out an application.

The screening matrix in our book treats supervision as the backstop at every level. When you can’t screen someone, a fully screened adult should supervise every interaction that person has with children. Our August post on screening by access walks through the tiers.

The realistic risk at an open event also looks different from what many people picture. A 2009 study of more than 67,000 sex crimes against children by non-family members found no increase around Halloween.

The crowd of strangers isn’t the main threat. At a festival, the main threat matches the threat on any other day. It comes from a child who drifts away from the group and an adult, known or unknown, who uses the gap.

How to Run an Open Event When Screening Can’t Reach Everyone

Substitutes for background screening usually cost little or nothing. They apply to a fall festival, an open house, a fun run, or a drop-in program:

• Sort every role before the event: Walk through the festival booth by booth and match each role to a screening tier. Day-of volunteers should complete the screening you use for occasional volunteers. If they don’t, keep them in open, visible spots with no duties that take them away from others. Partner organizations should confirm in writing that they screened their own people.
• Give supervisors a job that isn’t a booth: An adult running the ring toss watches the ring toss. Be sure to have some staff that you’ve fully screened available to concentrate on supervising by walking around. The CDC guidelines warn that a good ratio means nothing if every adult stands in a corner talking.
• Close what you can’t watch: Lock empty classrooms, storage rooms, and back hallways. Keep the event footprint small enough for your supervisors to cover. Decide ahead of time how children get to the restroom and who goes with them.
• Draw the line between parent and program: At a festival, most children arrive with a parent. Decide which children your organization is responsible for (the kids’ zone, the youth group working a booth) and which ones stay with their families. Tell parents in writing before they arrive exactly when they are responsible for their children and when you are.
• Tell unscreened helpers what they can’t do: A day-of volunteer should never walk a child to the restroom, take a child to a car, or lead a child out of sight. Youth sports guidance offers a simple test that fits here. Every interaction stays observable, and someone nearby can interrupt it.
• Plan for a lost child before one goes missing: Many stores use a missing-child protocol that gives every employee a script. Adapt it for your event. Get a description, alert every staff member, and watch the exits. Call police if a quick search doesn’t find the child.
• Make your staff easy to spot: Matching shirts or lanyards tell a lost child and a worried parent whom to approach. They also tell everyone else that someone is watching.

After the event, ask your supervisors two questions. Where did they lose sight of children? Which spaces did nobody cover? Those answers shape next year’s plan better than any checklist.

The Bottom Line

Screening every adult is a good instinct, but an open event makes it impossible. When you can’t screen, you have to supervise. Before your next public event, walk the site with your event lead and decide which screened adult will watch each space.

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Want to go deeper? Our on-demand course, Screening Staff and Volunteers, walks through how to build a screening process that fits each role in your organization. It also covers what to put in place for the people your screening can’t reach.