"I feel like if they're going to hire people at the school they should do background checks on everybody, thorough background checks," said parent Kizzie Dixon.
One school already knew about the allegations: Making Waves Academy, also in Richmond, fired Ron Guinto, 32, in November when police opened an investigation on him. But a month later, while the investigation was being conducted, he landed a job at Mira Vista. The principal says the HR department did a background check and did not find any criminal history on Guinto.
"They knew about it, you know, at the school or whatever. So I feel like they shouldn't have let him come here," said Dixon.
ABC7 News checked with a licensed private investigator who does background checks. She says uncovering everything about someone is harder than you would think.
"I think that people expect in the digital age that everything is going to be digitalized, everything is going to be electronic, and that's just not the case right now. There's a lot of things that can get missed and background checks tend to find things that are within the public realm," said private investigator Valerie Kraml.
She says even calling former employers for references can come up short.
"You would hope that a little bit of conversation would happen, but if you have a privacy contract in place, that wouldn't necessarily come through either," said Kraml.
Guinto has now been arrested and faces 14 charges of child molestation. Some parents at Mira Vista are sympathetic to the school administration and see this as an opportunity.
"We will definitely recover from this, we will talk about this and we will have our kids learn, predators are everywhere," said parent Roshni Macfarland. Richmond police said they didn't even know he had a job at Mira Vista they don't really release information on ongoing investigations because it could jeopardize their case. Guinto is still in jail and police will present their case will before the district attorney.
