RALEIGH — You may have missed this outrageous story about a Durham man, a registered sex offender, who is now accused of assaulting and attempting to molest a five-year-old child at an elementary school in Durham.
Police are now looking for the suspect, who was convicted back in 1996 of sexually molesting three young girls. As required by state law, he was listed on an official registry of sex offenders.
Nevertheless, Durham’s Burton Elementary School — either disregarding or not aware of a school system policy requiring background checks — invited this man onto the campus as a volunteer. That’s apparently where he met and subsequently engaged in inappropriate conduct with the five-year-old, though school officials insist that he was no longer a welcome volunteer at the time of the incident.
I hardly see that as the point. Surely, in this world of immediate access to web-based information, we can devise a system to detect criminals and sex offenders and train our schools in its use.
Yes, even sex offenders, once having served their sentence, deserve a chance to rejoin society. But the rest of us have a right and a duty to keep these potential predators away from our children. Schools and other institutions with which we entrust our children have the same duty. In this case, Burton Elementary and the Durham public school system in general shirked its duty, with a horrifying result.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.