That’s the Google search result that shocked Sherry Slonim of Atlanta, a divorced mother of a six-year old first grader and a two-year old toddler.

“I was just trying to do a little back grounding on my daughter’s new teacher”, said Ms. Slonim.  “The ‘CHILD PORNO AND TEACHERS’ query to Google was just kind of a private doodling joke that I typed in while I was trying to think up some good questions to ask.

It blew my mind!  I couldn’t believe those 593,000 hits!  So I typed it in again – Same result, and here’s some of the headlines of the first hits to come up:”

SUBSTITUTE TEACHER ACCUSED IN CHILD PORN CASE…
 
EX-TEACHER GETS 10 YEARS FOR ENORMOUS CHILD PORN COLLECTION…

N.J. SCHOOL TEACHER ARRESTED ON CHILD-PORN CHARGES…

CHILD PORN STING NETS TEACHERS AND MINISTER…

This was getting a little scary – So I typed in half-a-dozen more hypothetical queries for “teachers”.  Here’s the hits I got for each one:

“DRUG CHARGES TEACHERS”  226,000
“DRUNK CHARGES TEACHERS”  1,980,000  
“FRAUD CHARGES TEACHERS” 1,820,000
“ARRESTED TEACHERS”  2,200,000
“SEX OFFENDER TEACHERS”  1,860,000

Obviously, a lot a bad-guy teachers were getting away with murder --- or a least with fraud, drugs, sex offenses, and various other crimes.  While I’m sure that most teachers are dedicated and moral, who wants to play Russian roulette with their kid’s education?

So the first thing that I did was go to the website of the Georgia Department of Education.  I couldn’t find out anything relevant on teacher back grounding on the site, so I called them.  

Turns out Georgia does the usual checkouts when they first hire a teacher, but after that, well, anything goes unless somebody rats a teacher out - or - whatever the teacher’s doing hits  the front page of the newspapers.

So I decided “Fergeddaboudit!  This is my six year old kid we’re talking about here. There’s gotta be a better way of making sure that her teacher isn’t one of the bad guys.  How do I find out if my kid’s teacher has ever been busted for drugs, or for pornography, or for sexual stuff?

The first thing I did was some intensive surfing on the Net, trying to find a single site (a free one) that could help me do a really comprehensive background search.  Absolutely nada! Nothing! And believe me, I really looked!
 
Using Google was the obvious answer, but what questions should I ask?  And if I knew what questions to ask, who would have the patience to type in dozens of separate questions and then hit “Search” every time and then type in the next question?

I wanted to do was to be able to type the teacher’s  name just once into the search window, and then click on a pre-selected question on a drop–down menu, and then hit ‘Search’ -- and then just click on the next question and keep going.  No typing!

I guess the rest of my story ought to be called “How I took one of my alimony checks and hired a programmer and had him modify the Google search engine so I could develop a new site called www.checkoutmykidsteacher.org ”

Of course, it wasn’t quite that easy – What were the questions I had to ask in order to do a really in-depth background check?  

Fortunately, at the time I was dating this really sweet plain clothes detective (couldn’t have done it without him) and together we put together a laundry list of almost 100 back grounding questions.  I put that together with what my programmer was doing, spent sex weeks learning how to write passable HTML, and voila! – www.checkoutmykidsteacher.org

Does the site work?  Tried it out on my kid’s teacher.  Don’t ask!