Florence Snyder
Santa Rosa County Creep of the Week is also the Santa Rosa County School District’s 2016 Substitute Employee of the Year, proving yet again that Florida is never too busy to hand out meaningless awards, and always underfunded for things that matter.
Substitute teacher Richard Mack, 66, is charged with multiple counts of molesting multiple elementary school age children. The Pensacola News-Journal tells us “the investigation is still active so more information could be forthcoming.” The paper would have some of that information if the Santa Rosa School District had a personnel file of everyone who qualifies to be within touching distance of the kids. But it doesn’t, because Mack is a “contracted employee” of Professional Education Services Group (PESG) a company that supplies 500 school districts, with “innovative, hand-crafted solutions that meet the needs of your local school community.”
This is the kind of outsourcing the public rarely thinks about until the guy walking around your kid’s elementary school shows up in a hand-crafted mug shot, and there’s no “personnel office” that has to account for itself to local taxpayers.
PESG won’t answer media questions about its vetting process, which is about what you’d expect from a company whose acronym has the unfortunate sound of those things that House Speaker Richard Corcoran finds when he turns on the kitchen lights. But it didn’t take the News-Journal long to find out that Mack had been barred from teaching at two schools in neighboring Escambia County, where he dispensed unwanted, unwelcome and deeply disturbing back rubs to middle school girls, and ruminated on the possibility of shooters showing up at the classroom door, telling students he’d “hold the door open for them and let them come in.”
It will be up to school boards doing business with PESG to decide if the company’s hand-crafted vetting procedures are worth the money it makes, and the price children pay.
