Many, many years ago, when I was a member of a high school band, parental chaperones were critical to our ability to go just about anywhere. They were a small group of dedicated parents who tagged along on trips to Canada, Boston and elsewhere.

They would be in charge of supervising a certain number of students and even performed bed checks at night to make sure we all were where we were supposed to be. They were the hanky panky patrol.

“That sort of thing gives me the chills to be truthful with you,” said Bangor Superintendent Sandy Ervin this week. “Times have changed.”

They sure have.

Glenburn Superintendent Doug Smith found that out a couple of weeks ago when parents discovered that a convicted sex offender had been riding the bus with their children as a volunteer monitor.

Yikes!

The whole mess couldn’t have been more screwed up and confusing, but in short, a parent, Ernest Roy, was concerned with some harassment issues on the bus his child rode. Roy goes to the bus company that contracts transportation services with the school and volunteers to ride as a monitor. While bus drivers are subject to fingerprinting and criminal background checks, volunteers are not.

Roy did such a bang-up job the company decided to hire him. As they were in the process of completing a criminal background check, a mysterious “improper note” was discovered with Roy’s name in it. That resulted in a detective doing a background search on Roy and revealing his past.

If that weren’t enough, the school made a legally safe but oh so wrong decision to not inform the parents.

School officials were advised by their lawyers that they shouldn’t notify anyone about the incident until they had written notification of Roy’s criminal history, which was sent to them just about the time the story began making headlines. They also thought there was little urgency since Roy had since moved out of state.

That was wrong on a number of levels and it appears that Smith has learned that lesson the hard way.

“We would do something differently,” he said this week.

The parents’ anger is understandable, but instead of finger-pointing and laying blame, parents and school officials should be working to ensure the situation never happens again.

Schools all across this state rely on volunteers. Parents are often in the classroom helping with special projects or conducting small reading groups. They chaperone field trips and help out with fundraisers.

But unfortunately times have changed and schools need to be wary when allowing any volunteer to have access to children. Across the country, school systems are debating whether volunteers should be subject to background checks. Some schools have stopped using them altogether.

That’s a terribly sad commentary on where we are as a society.

Let’s hope we don’t have to go that far, but the Glenburn incident may serve to spark some conversations about the roles of volunteers in our schools. Volunteers should be monitored and not put in a position of authority.

When I was a kid, the hanky panky patrol used to worry about students fooling around with one another. Today the worry is much more sinister.