The status of a mentor applicant's background check may come back from the various background check agencies as "Pending Investigation." To ensure data integrity, the regional screening manager will be responsible for updating the background check status to "Pending Investigation."
Volunteers with a pending investigation must provide additional information or documents to the school district before they can be cleared to volunteer with a student. Investigations may be caused by any number of actions on the mentor’s part. Aside from the volunteer’s status, the school district or background check vendor does not share any information with us. All communications regarding their investigation stay between the district and the volunteer, unless the volunteer chooses to share any details with iMentor.
How do we find out that someone is pending investigation?
NYC: After they are fingerprinted, the regional screening manager will receive an email notification from the Go Pass team’s automated system indicating that the volunteer is ineligible for service until further documents are received and evaluated.
Chicago: After they are fingerprinted, the regional screening manager will receive an email notification from CPS indicating that the volunteer is ineligible for service until further documents are received and evaluated.
Baltimore: Our contact at the Baltimore DOE will notify the regional screening manager on a regularly set schedule regarding the pending status of volunteers who have been fingerprinted, including applicants who are under pending investigation.
What do I do as their screener?
Usually, nothing—it’s the applicant’s responsibility to resolve this with the district so they can move forward with the iMentor screening process.
However, if you haven’t heard from your applicant for a while and are wondering what their status is, you can send custom Pending investigation check in emails for NYC and Chicago applicants ( Baltimore do not have these templates yet- you'll have to write something up as needed). While we can’t intervene in their investigation, we can urge them to respond to the vendor's inquiry. We can also ask the vendor to send another email or provide the applicant with the appropriate contact information and next steps to move forward with the district if that’s what they need.
If an applicant under pending investigation does not provide necessary paperwork, their background check status will become ‘Unresponsive to Pending Investigation’ rather than rejected. That mentor will be notified by the screener that they are being withdrawn and to contact the vendor for next steps if they wish to continue. If that happens, the screener resumes support in assuring they've fulfilled the vendor's request.
New York City
The regional screening manager will check the PETS database every Tuesday and Thursday to determine if a mentor with a status of "Pending Investigation" has moved from Ineligible to Eligible. They will also check who has been in that status for over 10 days and follow up with Go Pass accordingly. Screeners will receive an email to reach out to the volunteer and instruct them to reach out to Go Pass.
If the volunteer is Go Pass eligible, they will update their status to “Background Check Approved” and populate the Background Check Eligible date and the Background Date First Approved. If they are ineligible, they will add a note in the Background Check note field in Salesforce of the date they checked PETS, noting there is still an ongoing pending investigation. All notes will be kept sequentially in the field with the newest note at the top, so you can see the pattern of work on each applicant.
Additional details can be found in NYC Background Check Procedures. For a list of NYC applicants currently "Pending Investigation," refer to this report.
Chicago and Baltimore
Regional screening managers will monitor clearances via the periodic updates we receive from Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in Chicago, and the Office of Human Capital in Baltimore.
Details on the process for a mentor to clear a CPS investigation is outlined in Chicago Background Check Procedures. For a list of Chicago applicants who have taken over 10 days to clear, refer to this report.
