An internal review has found that three in 10 employees of D.C. Public Schools have expired background checks. That includes teachers and central office workers.

Chancellor Lewis Ferebee shared the review’s findings with a group of parents Tuesday night at Capitol Hill Montessori at Logan — a school in NoMa that serves kids from pre-K through 8th grade — and in a follow-up letter Wednesday morning to all the school system’s families.

“I want to be clear that all DCPS employees pass a robust clearance process including fingerprinting and an FBI background check prior to receiving an offer letter and reporting to work. DCPS employees are then required to renew their clearance every two years per DC Municipal Regulations,” Ferebee wrote. “As a result of our district’s review, we determined that 31 percent of current DCPS staff members have a clearance that has expired. We have also determined that DCPS partners are not consistently in compliance with our clearance requirements.”

The internal review followed an incident in mid-May at Capitol Hill Montessori, where an employee of a provider of after-school programming was arrested and charged for allegedly engaging in improper sexual contact with a 13-year-old student. The incident, which was first reported by WAMU, also revealed that Springboard Education — the Massachusetts-based company which operated in almost two dozen public and charter schools — could not produce documentation of required background checks for all its employees in D.C. schools.

The incident prompted a system-wide review of contracts with providers of after-school programs and the status of background checks for those providers and also DCPS staff. In July, DCPS announced it would not renew its contract with Springboard, which provided after-school programming in eight of its schools. Springboard is one of over a 100 outside providers of services to the school system, and the only one the school system will stop working with over concerns with background checks.

In Tuesday’s meeting with parents and in his letter on Wednesday, Ferebee said he was adding resources to get all staff — DCPS and outside providers — up to date on their background checks.

“By the first day of school, 100 percent of DCPS after-school staff and outside providers will have an active clearance. By the end of September, 100 percent of DCPS school staff members will have an active clearance. By the end of October, 100 percent of DCPS central office staff will have an active clearance,” he wrote.

DCPS employees will also receive a notice 60 days before their background check expires so they can take steps to renew it.

“Bottom line, we’re out of compliance and we need to be in compliance,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “Whatever it takes to get us there, that’s what we’ll do.”

Ferebee also says he is taking other steps in response to the incident, including more training for DCPS staff and employees on how to spot and respond to cases of sexual misconduct or abuse, along with a curriculum for all students to teach them how to identify and report inappropriate behavior.

Parents at Capitol Hill Montessori expressed mixed emotions after Tuesday’s meeting with Ferebee, saying they were glad changes were being made but frustrated with how the school system handled the May incident and the later revelations on incomplete background checks.

“I’m happy the chancellor and central office staff came, because we’ve been trying to get this meeting to happen since June. I’m glad he apologized for what’s happened, and it seems like it did trouble him. I’m glad they have a new policy on student safety,” said Sameena Safdar Kluck, a parent of two children at the school. “It just feels like we’re constantly getting new policies thrown at us and apologies for what happened in the past, but it keeps happening over and over again almost like Whack-a-Mole.”

Kluck says she’s most frustrated because she believes DCPS hasn’t been transparent enough with parents, and especially with parents at Capitol Hill Montessori — where elevated lead levels were found in water in 2016 and parents later discovered the school had not been assessed for modernization. And Danica Petroshius, a former president of the school’s parent-teacher organization, says she’s not convinced Ferebee understood how concerned parents were about student safety after the incident in May.

“I think they’re more interested in protecting the agency and the adults in the building than protecting the kids. This chancellor is not taking this seriously as a leader. I expected to see someone standing in front of us with a sense of urgency,” she said.

But in his letter, Ferebee — who took over the school system earlier this year — promised to be more open with DCPS parents and students.

“I will continue to be transparent with our community about our successes as well as our challenges as a district. I am committed to working together toward solutions. The well-being of our students is my top priority and I will continue to work to ensure that every student is learning in a safe and supportive environment,” he wrote.

Ferebee’s actions only touch on DCPS. In the charter sector — which educates almost half of D.C.’s 93,000 students — it is up to individual schools to ensure that staff and contractors are up to date on their background checks. In June, E.L. Haynes, which also worked with Springboard, said it had found no problems with the provider’s employees. But KIPP said it had, and is no longer working with Springboard.

“We ended our relationship with Springboard as they were not able to resolve our background check concerns,” wrote KIPP spokesman Adam Rupe in an email. “We’re working with a new provider this year that has been able to provide background checks for their before- and after-care staff.”

While school is starting at the end of August, some of the background checks won’t be done until October. Kluck says she remains nervous about sending her kids back to Capitol Hill Montessori — but also says she’s been left with few good options.

“You want to isolate it and say it was just this one guy, it was just this one after-care provider, it’s just this one school,” she said. “But this is a systemic problem, and I left feeling very uneasy. But what am I going to do? Am I going to home-school my children?”

In an interview Wednesday, Ferebee also said that DCPS would look at school districts nationally to see how they handle background checks for staff and contractors, and floated the idea of expanding the city’s regulations to more regularly check on employees.

“Ideally, we would have a system that would not only check for criminal activity but also monitor any criminal activity for employees once they are hired so we know what’s happening and we have a better understanding if there’s any risk associated with employees’ behaviors out of work,” he said.

This story originally appeared on WAMU.