A+PEL urges St. Mary board to consider using employee numbers

BY RANDY LOUIS, THE DAILY IBERIAN

CENTERVILLE - The St. Mary Parish School Board took no action after receiving a presentation from Tim Francis of the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana to consider utilizing employee numbers rather than Social Security numbers.

Francis said he wants the School Board to look into getting a simple identification system that uses an employee's last name along with the last four digits of their Social Security numbers.

He also reminded the School Board that, in March, the Social Security numbers of approximately 380 employees of the school system were accessed by a Yahoo! Web search crawler.

During his presentation, Francis told the School Board that the Privacy Act in 1974 requires all governmental agencies - federal, state and local - which request Social Security numbers to provide a disclosure statement.

"If you have given your Social Security number to a governmental agency after 1999 it cannot be part of a public record," Francis said. "The employees' Social Security numbers that were on line earlier this year were available for several days. This should not have happen and no one saw it coming."

Francis said when teachers attend an after-hour school in-service there is a sign-in sheet with a place for their name and Social Security number.

"The sign-in sheet goes through several persons before arriving in the payroll department," Francis said. "If the School Board makes this change everyone will be grateful".

Wayne Deslatte, School Board president, and Marilyn LaSalle, member, assured Francis they will look into the matter and get back with him at a later day.

"I like this idea of using the employee identification number instead of using Social Security numbers," LaSalle said. "Let's research it and get back with Mr. Francis."

In other business, the School Board:

  • Acknowledged and recognized it's "Teachers of the Year" for the 2007-08 school year. Adele Hartman, an elementary school teacher at Bayou Vista Elementary School, Kim Darbonne, a teacher at Berwick Junior High School, and Tiffany Coleman, a teacher at Patterson Senior High School are this year "Teachers of the Year".

  • Approved LARMA as its insurance carrier through Paul's Agency for causality insurance. The cost of the policy is $291,201 and includes general liability, auto liability/physical damage, board errors, and omissions liability.

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