By Eric Smith -- The Capital

THERE'S NO way for anxious parents, or for government agencies, to guarantee absolute safety for children. All anyone can do is use good sense, take reasonable precautions, and hope for the best.

County Recreation and Parks Director Dennis Callahan came up with a reasonable precaution five years ago, when he instituted voluntary criminal background checks for youth league coaches - a process that became mandatory in mid-2001.

Any skepticism we had on the usefulness of this procedure vanished in November 2001, when the county released the results of checks of about 1,100 of the 4,000 head coaches. Twenty-two had criminal convictions involving drug dealing, armed robbery or assault.

But, as our story last Sunday showed, the system can only be pushed so far. While official coaches and assistants are screened, it's up to the head coaches to submit the names of those who work with the children.

Given the sheer size of the programs and the turnover of coaches, it's impossible for the county to be responsible for getting everyone screened. Youth recreation coaches have a lot to do, and submitting paperwork on community volunteers, to put it politely, might not seem like the highest priority.

This led to two unfortunate incidents in less than a year. An assistant coach of a Harundale youth league soccer team turned out to have a nine-year-old conviction for lewd and lascivious acts with a child. More recently, the Gambrills Odenton Recreation Council was put on probation for a year after it allowed a man on the state sex offender registry to work with the 12-and-under baseball team.

There were no allegations that the two men did anything wrong in their recent contacts with the teams. But they should have been screened out.

Of more than 10,000 volunteers screened since the background checks became mandatory, fewer than 2 percent proved to have some sort of problem on their records.

That's far from alarming - but it does show that the screening program serves a purpose, should be continued and should be used by all coaches and recreational organizations. The very existence of the screening probably deters pedophiles from using a favorite strategy: working their way into youth sports programs.

We're forced to use such methods because the county, like most of America, has changed. Most of us can't even remember living in the sort of community where everyone knew everyone else. Most of us know very little about our neighbors. So precautions must be taken.

And such precautions can only stretch so far. As one parent pointed out in the Sunday story, screening requirements are no substitute for personal parental involvement in youth sports activities.

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Published June 16, 2005, The Capital, Annapolis, Md.
Copyright © 2005 The Capital, Annapolis, Md.