What qualifies

A record is published only when the subject was a K-12 school employee (teacher, coach, aide, principal, counselor or other staff), at least one victim was a student (at any school), and the case reached an adjudicated outcome: a conviction, a guilty plea or a no-contest plea.

Not published: arrests, charges, indictments, investigations, resignations or administrative leave, however well sourced; college and university staff; students or anyone who was a minor at the time; cases where no victim was a student; and financial crimes that are not misconduct against students.

How records are verified

Each record must rest on a primary source (a court opinion or docket, a U.S. Attorney, Department of Justice or Homeland Security Investigations release, a state attorney general, a county prosecutor, or a state licensing board) or on two independent news outlets that agree on the person, place, outcome and date. Aggregators, blogs and content farms never count.

Before publication, each record is read against its cited source to confirm the name, role, school, outcome and date; the "Verified" date on a record is when that check was done. Before every update, every record is also checked automatically: the outcome must be adjudicated; the state must agree with the source; the category must agree with the summary; the date must be the conviction, plea or sentencing date, not an arrest date; and every source link must still resolve. A record that fails any check is held back. A record is taken down until it is re-verified when its working links no longer include a court or prosecutor source or two independent news reports; a dead link on a record that still meets that test is replaced or removed at the next review. A wire story republished by several outlets, or a story that retells another outlet's reporting, counts as one news report. A court ruling that reverses or vacates a conviction takes the record down unless a later conviction or plea is documented.

Sex offender registries

An official state sex offender registry entry may be used to confirm a conviction (the offense, the convicting jurisdiction and the conviction date). It is used only when the registry entry has its own page that can be linked, and only when the name and other identifying details plainly match the case. A registry entry is never used on its own to establish that the person worked at a school or that a victim was a student; those facts must come from another qualifying source. Registry pages are looked up by hand, never collected in bulk, and the date of each check is recorded. BadFaculty does not copy registry data, does not show registry results for the people it lists, and is not itself a registry: many convictions listed here do not require registration, and registration status changes over time.

Records state who, where, what outcome and when, in plain terms, without characterizing language. Victims are never named. When a source does not report a school or district, the record says so rather than guessing. Dates reported only to the year are shown as year only.

Corrections and removals

Email thebadfaculty@gmail.com with the case ID shown on the record. We respond within 5 business days. We will correct or remove a record on documentation of an expungement, a vacated conviction, a conviction overturned on appeal, or mistaken identity, and we correct any factual error the source does not support.

Every change to a published record is dated on the corrections log. Removed records are listed there without the person's name. Case IDs are never reused for a different person.

Coverage

Coverage reflects confirmed public records processed to date; absence of records in a jurisdiction does not indicate an absence of cases.

What this site is not

This site reports public records. It does not rank, score or comment on individuals, and inclusion is not a statement about anyone beyond what the cited sources report.