Educator fingerprint and criminal check, T chart

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You did not specify which state, so by default, you get Georgia, my own state.
Georgia requires the fingerprinting and background check required by federal law. Certified staff do not pay for fingerprinting when offered employment, substitute teachers generally do pay. It apparently is left up to the individual school district to determine what is a negative report on the criminal background check, and this may vary according to school district, which in Georgia, is generally by county (excepting some systems which operate a city school system within a county). I can locate no Georgia statute that governs on the state level what is considered a passing background check, and what degrees of passing might be - only that the statutes require notification of the applicant if a check is deemed unacceptable by the school system, by whatever standards they choose to measure acceptable or unacceptable.
Obviously, felony offenses carry more weight than misdemeanor ones, and moving violations (traffic tickets) even less, unless extreme. Also, offenses dealing with sexual matters, child abuse and the like would also be instantly bad, since the candidate is applying for a job working with children. There apparently is no set formula for which offenses would eliminate a candidate from consideration, and which would not automatically do so, however. There is no appeals process if a candidate is denied, only a requirement for notification to the applicant of the reason for denial. The timeline for getting the fingerprint process completed varies. A candidate may be employed on a temporary basis until the background check results are obtained, at which point, either termination or official tender of a contract is made, depending on pass/fail.

Copied and pasted below are the relevant portions of the various Web sites I searched to locate this information.

http://www.gapsc.com/certification/index.asp :
State and federal background checks are not required for Georgia certification of educators, but fingerprinting and FBI background checks are required for professional employment of an ...