By Dave Dahl/Illinois Radio Network
SPRINGFIELD – Back to school? Background check.

It’s now the law for student teachers in Illinois, though one of the state’s biggest suppliers of new teachers said it’s nothing new.

“When you say, I want to be a teacher, you are taking responsibility for someone else’s child,” said Deb Garrahy, director of the Cecilia J. Lauby Teacher Education Center at Illinois State University. She said the background check has been a requirement for ISU’s prospective teachers for perhaps a decade or more. The education community, she added, must “do the best that we can in providing a safe environment for our teachers, and, certainly, a safe environment for our schoolchildren.”

It really puts student teachers on the same level as regular school employees.

Garrahy added other local districts, including Unit 5 in Normal, also have this requirement, so “our students have been used to this for quite some time; by that time they’ve already had about three of them.”

The future teachers have more rigors, too.

“We require that our students have a minimum of 100 pre-student teaching clinical hours, and fifty of those hours must be in a diverse classroom,” Garrahy said, adding “it really gives them the opportunity to see teaching from multiple lenses.”