Sex-offender screening for schools & childcare
Screen staff, substitutes, and volunteers against every US sex-offender registry with source-verified results — purpose-built for organizations working with children.
No code needed — search from your dashboard, or integrate the full API when you’re ready.
The problem for schools, childcare providers, and youth programs
- Volunteers and substitutes cycle through quickly
- Applicants may have registered in another state
- A single miss is unacceptable when children are involved
Outcomes
- Screen every staff member, substitute, and volunteer
- Cover out-of-state history in one call
- Keep a source-verified screening record
How Offendersearch helps
US-wide coverage
Catch out-of-state registrations, not just the local registry.
Fast volunteer screening
Low-latency calls make it practical to screen every volunteer, every season.
Source-verified results
Each match carries source provenance for your records.
What the law actually requires
Child care carries the cleanest registry-search mandate in US law. Under the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a qualifying check is not one search but five, and — unusually — the sex offender component is named separately from the FBI fingerprint check rather than being satisfied by it. It is also multi-state by construction: the duty follows where the staff member has lived, not where they now work. Note the contrast with K-12, where the federal picture is far thinner than vendor marketing suggests.
| Jurisdiction | Citation | Applies to | What it requires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal | 45 CFR § 98.43(b) | Staff | A qualifying check comprises an FBI fingerprint check using Next Generation Identification; a search of the NCIC National Sex Offender Registry; and searches of the state criminal repository, the state sex offender registry and the state child abuse and neglect registry. |
| Federal | 45 CFR § 98.43(b)(3) | Staff | Those state-level registry searches must be run in the state where the staff member resides and in every state where they resided during the preceding five years. |
| Federal | 45 CFR § 98.43 | Staff | Existing staff must be rechecked not less than once during each five-year period. |
| Federal | 42 U.S.C. § 9858f | Staff | The underlying statute requiring states receiving CCDBG funds to have these requirements in effect for child care staff members. |
Citations link to the primary text. This is background, not legal advice — obligations change, and your counsel is the right reader of your own facts.
And what it doesn’t
K-12 is the common misconception, and it is worth stating flatly. 20 U.S.C. § 7926 — often cited as “the federal school background check law” — mandates no such thing; it prohibits assisting a person known to have engaged in sexual misconduct with a minor to obtain a new job. Actual K-12 screening duties are state law and vary widely. The SafeSport Act likewise imposes reporting, training and one-on-one contact limits, not background checks. If a vendor tells you a federal statute requires you to screen teachers, ask them to name the section.
Screening practices for schools, childcare providers, and youth programs
Treat the registry search as its own step
The CCDF check names the sex offender component separately from the FBI fingerprint check for a reason: a fingerprint result does not report registration status. Facilities that assume the print check covers it have a gap that surfaces at audit.
Follow the residence history, not the payroll address
The five-year residence rule is the operative difficulty. A single-state search satisfies the letter of nothing if your staff member lived in two other states during the lookback.
Diary the five-year recheck at hire
The recheck interval is easy to satisfy and easy to forget. Setting the date when the first check clears is more reliable than any annual sweep.
Screen volunteers on the same basis as staff
Unpaid adults with unsupervised access present the same risk and are the group most often left out of a screening policy written around employment.
Questions from schools, childcare providers, and youth programs
Can we screen large volunteer cohorts at once?
Yes. Run searches in bulk; metered pricing means you only pay per call with a volume rate after 2,000 calls a month.
Do you cover every state a family might have lived in?
A default search runs nationwide, so prior out-of-state registrations are covered.
Registry and criminal records on one key
Most schools, childcare providers, and youth programs need more than one check, and running two vendors means two integrations, two contracts and two invoices. Both run on the same account, the same key and the same response shape.
Sex offender registry
58 US registries — the 50 states, DC and the territories — continuously updated, with photographs, aliases, addresses and the official record citation on every match.
Criminal records
more than a thousand county, state and federal jurisdictions — county jail rosters, statewide prison systems, court records and warrants — with coverage in every US state, in the same scored, source-cited schema.
1,375
county jurisdictions in the criminal roster — the layer where most US matters begin, and the one thin vendors skip.
51
states with a live statewide prison system, for the post-conviction picture in the same call.
58
US sex offender registries, continuously updated — the check schools, childcare providers, and youth programs are most often required to run.
See what each state publishes, or the live list at /v1/criminal/sources.
Per check, with no floor underneath it
$0.15 a call, dropping to $0.11 for every call past 2,000 in a calendar month. No setup fee, no per-seat licence, no monthly minimum and no annual contract — so the price scales down with you as well as up.
| Checks / month | Cost | Per check |
|---|---|---|
| 500 | $75.00 | $0.1500 |
| 5,000 | $630.00 | $0.1260 |
| 50,000 | $5,580.00 | $0.1116 |
A batch is billed per row, so bulk screening costs the same per person as a single lookup. Full pricing · screen a CSV without code.
Screen schools, childcare providers, and youth programs with one API
Screen staff, substitutes, and volunteers against every US sex-offender registry with source-verified results — purpose-built for organizations working with children.