Fort Collins Coloradoan: Schools ought to immediately inform parents when a school employee is arrested for any offense related to child safety. It’s a pretty simple value statement; and, despite a few mendacious arguments to the contrary, the matter is a proper step toward respecting parental authority.

Fair warning: Before declaring aloud you agree with me, know that doing so will place you at ferocious odds with most public-school officials in Colorado, with state legislators, with members of Colorado’s largest teachers’ union; and of course with child predators and attorneys who defend them.

People in these categories prefer keeping parents in the dark about school-employee arrests. We know this because, by standing together, they have succeeded in doing so — over, and again — for many years.

That’s why Preston Middle School parents in Fort Collins were, for months, unaware their school’s paraprofessional had been arrested in 2009 for child sexual assault. The community, outraged, learned of T.J. Skillman’s heinous charges only after The Coloradoan obtained internal communication records from the Poudre School District.

E-mails showed that PSD officials, fearing bad publicity, agreed they’d inform parents only in the event the media discovered the arrest. Skillman pled guilty to Internet luring of a child, and sexual contact with a 13-year-old girl. There was more.

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