A man experienced what appeared to be a medical crisis at High Desert Middle School in Bend in the spring of 2022. School staff provided him with water and assistance.

The incident revealed a gap, though, in information that the school district had about sex offenders on school grounds. The man was a registered sex offender. The district’s Raptor screening program for visitors wouldn’t have identified him as a sex offender.

“Despite our school district investing millions of dollars in school security, including sophisticated visitor management systems like Raptor, we discovered a critical flaw in our sex offender screening process,” Bend-La Pine Superintendent Steve Cook told legislators on Monday. “Our current system, which we believed was comprehensive, can only identify Level 3 sex offenders from the state of Oregon.”

That’s only 5% of the registered sex offenders in Oregon. Level 3 offenders are believed to be the worst risk of reoffending. Level 1 and Level 2 are also sex offenders. The difference between the levels for male offenders depends on how they score on a risk assessment used across the United States called Static 99R, which enables people to be ranked according to risks related to sexual recidivism. Female and juvenile offenders are ranked with in-person evaluations by the Oregon Board of Parole.

The district asked the Oregon State Police for a complete list to upload into its screening system. The state police was happy to help, as much as it could. The district was told by law the state police could only provide the district with complete information on offenders in Deschutes County and would need to continually make requests for updates. The district would also not be able to upload this new list into its Raptor screening program. It means some 30,000 sex offenders would not be able to be readily identified when they entered a school.

Rep. Emerson Levy, D-Bend, is one of the chief sponsors of House Bill 3839 to plug the gap. Her bill would essentially make the information available to school districts. Levy and state Sen. Anthony Broadman, D-Bend, testified in favor of the bill on Monday, along with Superintendent Cook. It was before Bend Democratic state Rep. Jason Kropf’s judiciary committee.

“This is not about creating fear, but about creating responsible data-driven safety measures,” Cook said.

There was an unresolved, technical question that came up during testimony on the bill about the need to be in compliance with federal law in regard to access to such databases. We don’t know if that actually interferes with this bill or not.

What was not discussed was the structure of Oregon’s sex offender registry. Is this gap a bug or a feature? Has it worked to provide only partial lists of sex offenders to schools? Or have there been incidents? Does that matter? Nobody testified before the committee about that issue, perhaps because it may not be a smart career move to, in a way, be defending sex offenders.

The bill seems logical, though we do think legislators should hear testimony and ask questions on that point before moving ahead with the bill.