YOUR DESCRIPTION HAS REACHED THE LIMIT OF CHARACTERS ALLOWED AND WAS CUT. If your child's classmate had a history of sexually abusing children, would you want to know? Either way, it may not matter. Juveniles in North Carolina are protected by a strict right to privacy, even when they have a history of committing violent crimes. South Carolina‚„s laws are geared more towards informing the public. However, in North Carolina, lawmakers feel a juvenile's right to privacy outweighs the public's right to know about their criminal history.

There could be a student sex offender in your child's classroom but you'd never know. One foster parent tells us, "They have a right to their privacy, they're still children." In fact, North Carolina law strictly protects the privacy of all juvenile offenders, including teens who have committed violent sex crimes.

We spoke with a woman who is specially certified to foster high-risk juvenile offenders and chose to conceal her identity. Her training is designed to help offenders turn their lives around, especially those who have committed sex offenses. She tells us, "There are a lot of children in the foster care system with sex offenses, they're a hard to place child. That's one of the reasons why I do foster care. I know by going to court weekly that there are a lot of kids in the system that are having these charges."

Court ordered probation for teen offenders often requires them to have constant supervision, even while attending public schools. Asheville City School principal, Greg Townsend, tells us administrators also develop their own type of safety plan for each of these high-risk students. Townsend says, "There is that level of supervision where we're even tracking a student through the hallway, sometimes it's an actual escort."

According to North Carolina state statute, when a student commits an "Offense that would be considered a felony in Adult Court.....the Division of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) is required to notify the (school) principal.‚ Foster parents and/or the student‚„s parent/guardian is also expected to communicate with school officials, but that doesn‚„t always happen. The foster parent we spoke with says, "If that were my foster child, I would definitely go to the school counselor and notify them."

Asheville attorney Jason Wilson worked as a public defender before going into private practice. His specialty: representing juvenile offenders, many accused of sexual offenses. News 13 uncovered one instance where a teen sex offender attended a Buncombe County School last Fall, for most of the school year, without the additional supervision required by his probation. Wilson feels, "There needs to be some better safeguards in the school system to make sure no cases fall through the cracks." Wilson goes on to say, "If I had a child in the local school system, I believe that I would want to have some knowledge." Wilson says laws that protect a juvenile offender's privacy could also place innocent children at risk, adding

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WLOS ABC 13 News serves the Asheville, NC area and the rest of western North Carolina and Upstate South Carolina. We keep our audience informed through local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of community events, sports and entertainment programming since 1954.

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