We hear from viewers and consultants that crime and education are two big topics of interest. Usually those are two separate story ideas, but last fall we decided to work on an investigation that touched on both.
Our premise was simple: Find out how many of the state's educators have criminal records.
The strength of our state's Open Records Act meant we could do the background checks ourselves. All we needed to obtain was the employment records of all current public school employees and the state's prison and parole databases.
We teamed up with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in August to do the investigation and collaborated our efforts to break the story on air and in print Nov. 4-5.
Our investigation found no one had ever checked the criminal backgrounds of