Are criminals volunteering in your school? (News: special section: school security).

It takes seconds, and it could mean protecting a student from a pedophile roaming your halls unattended.

Volunteers who tutor K-12 students in reading and math in Memphis (Tenn.) Public Schools are screened before they even step into school buildings. And every visitor, including parents and plumbers, at the Carpenter Elementary School in the Deer Park (Texas) Independent School District is screened before they can roam school halls.

Such screening is done via rapsheets.com. The national online database has 123 million criminal records from the state, county and local levels of government. And checks on the site can yield 40 percent more records than traditional courthouse searches. The service also offers sex offender records for 32 states.

"People are becoming more aware I think because of all the media attention toward kids being kidnapped or abused," says Bill Whitford, chief operating officer of rapsheets.com.

"Until the Internet, there was no way to check a large amount of data in a large geographic area," says Camille Gamble, rapsheets.com spokeswoman. "One out of eight men in this country have a felony record."

In Memphis, Our Children, Our Future is a year-old, one-on-one volunteer tutoring program for Memphis K-12 public students in reading and math. Volunteers are recruited and then trained. Then, they are screened via rapsheets.com. "We knew we weren't going to send volunteers into schools without background checks," says Barbara Dawson, volunteer program manager of Our Children, Our Future.

Using a swipe machine and computer, they use a person's license to check for any problems. With a name and birthdate, a general background check is performed. If further research is required, the social security number is typed in. It shows speeding tickets as well as public intoxication and assaults. And even if volunteers have some record, they consider the time that has lapsed. "I think it makes the school administrators a lot more comfortable with the volunteers who go into the schools," Dawson says.

At W. A. Carpenter Elementary School in Deer Park, Texas, officials use the database of iOffice Corp., based in Houston. iOffice offers to the school iCampusVisit, an online service which includes listings of the sex offender registry, and the driver's license swipe machine as part of a pilot program. Earlier in the school year, an intruder had stolen two purses from teachers during the school day. So administrators started to think about additional safety features.

"We were interested in getting away from a paper system in addition to being able to verify and identify registered sex offenders in our area," says Martha Roehrick, school secretary who meets visitors at the front desk. Before, local police supplied about 10 to 12 pages of registered sex offenders in the area. But with iCampusVisit, she can swipe the visitor's driver's license and know if they were convicted or not. If there are .no flags, a visitor badge is automatically printed out. "We've been lucky enough not to find anyone," she says. But if there were an alert on someone and they were convicted, they would be asked to leave the school grounds immediately. She would then call police.

Under a federal law, if someone runs a criminal check for business purposes, the person needs to give their OK If someone just wants to check out if a neighbor or potential tenant in an apartment is a creep, the person can check it without the person in question knowing, Gamble says.

www.iofficecorp.com.www.rapsheets.com