Information from TJ Bennett, Legislative Liaison/Program Developer MSDE/DECD/Office of Child Care regarding new fingerprinting requirements:
Some of the fingerprint vendors have expressed a willingness to travel to locations to do mass fingerprinting. I believe the requirement is 20 or more people. (It may even be as low as 15). I cannot set this up unfortunately. Providers will have to make these arrangements.
The two of which I am aware (FYI Fingerprints and MD Livescan) are not charging much, if any, more than the charge would be if people went to their fingerprinting locations. I have agreed this is a wonderful idea!
What I will need so the reimbursements can happen:
• I would prefer if facilities (associations, etc.) can pre-register with the fingerprinting service so they can get individual receipts for each person printed
• If individual receipts are not possible, I need the facility (or Association, etc.) to provide a list of names where each person fingerprinted must sign next to their name. This should accompany the mass receipt from the fingerprinting vendor. Please ensure legibility. I need to create a worksheet from this so I need to be able to read it!
• Current staff (membership) roster
• Invoice (attached). Also available on our website.
• ALL documentation must be received in the time-frame indicated on the attached schedule. If it’s late, we’re not going to process it for payment. It can, however, be early!
• We are REIMBURSING for CURRENT staff only. (For ease, that means that once an invoice is submitted, the center/home is considered done. We will not issue more than one payment to a location). Hold all paperwork until everyone is printed. Remember though, that it MUST come in before the assigned deadline or we will not process it.
• It would also be deeply appreciated by me if you could indicate the region where you are located on the paperwork!
If you are an Association and choose to do this, your accompanying documentation must ALSO indicate where each member works, or if they are a family provider, etc.) We are going to take this opportunity to ensure our records are up-to-date with regard to staff lists. It would also be deeply appreciated by me if you could indicate the region where everyone works on the paperwork!
Billing Statement for Fingerprinting Reimbursement
Other news:
Programs that begin with ‘The’. Drop ‘The’. They will follow the fingerprint schedule for the letter of the alphabet that corresponds with the next word in the name. For example: ‘The Bestest Place on Earth’ would get printed with the ‘B’ group.
BE SURE TO INCLUDE OUR AUTHORIZATION NUMBER WHEN GETTING PRINTED.
We’ve been getting a lot of notifications from CJIS that we aren’t getting our information because our authorization number is not being used. If this happens, the person WILL have to be printed again and we will NOT reimburse for it the second time. No 365 day form allowed!
Paid/unpaid substitutes MUST be printed. Anyone who has unsupervised access to children MUST be printed!!!!
Fingerprint Permission Form – This is a requirement from the FBI as part of the federal rap-back. There are several versions of this form out there. So long as the document begins with: “As an applicant who is the subject…” and has the lines for Facility name/signature/date, it doesn’t matter which version is used.
Everyone is to sign and return this form to their regional offices. It does not matter if it’s a fax copy, an email copy, etc. Please note that each individual must sign the form themselves. Meaning, a center director, or a child care provider, may NOT sign the form for their staff, etc. It would help our regional offices if these were sent as a batch from each location, rather than one or two at a time.
I’ve gotten several questions about how out of state people should handle the fingerprint requirement. Here is the link to Child Care Aware. It will assist these providers in contacting their state fingerprinting and CPS agencies. http://childcareaware.org
ALL states are required, within 45 days, to respond to requests for out of state background and CPS checks. All we can do is point the providers to Child Care Aware and they will have to begin the process of figuring out how to meet the requirement.
Some information from CJIS:
With RAP Back you will be getting notified for any criminal history that has been reported to the FBI. There will not be a need for re-fingerprinting your staff every 5 years in order to obtain updated information.
Maryland CJIS cannot use another state’s fingerprint card. We can only use our own manual ink cards or Live scan machine. This printing can be done at any private provider location in the state, MVA Hazmat location, or CJIS Fingerprinting at Reisterstown Rd (only place that can do ink cards), and some government agencies (see our website for specific locations) http://dpscs.maryland.gov/publicservs/fingerprint.shtml
We will provide fingerprint cards to an applicant, if they need it to take to a location to be printed out of state. We also provide them to agencies that have an authorization number who need to provide it to out of state applicants.
Watch the website for more information, too. We’ll keep it updated as often as possible. I will also create a FAQ for it as soon as I can.
http://earlychildhood.marylandpublicschools.org/fingerprinting
and then