Enhanced ‘Essential 3’ roll-out part of implementing task force recommendations to better protect the young and vulnerable

About 800 clergy, business administrators, Catholic school principals and other parish and school leaders participated in three Safe Environment training sessions during the past week. At the sessions, leaders learned about enhancements to the “Essential 3” requirements and other efforts to protect the young and vulnerable in parishes, Catholic schools and other ministries within the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

The “Essential 3” are the requirements all archdiocesan, parish and Catholic school employees, as well as all volunteers who interact with minors or vulnerable adults, must meet:

1. Safe environment training;

2. An acceptable background check; and

3. Acknowledgment of an approved code of conduct.

These requirements have been in place for several years in the archdiocese. Under the existing policy, as long as a person remained employed at the same place or didn’t have a break of more than a year in volunteer service at a parish or Catholic school, re-checks weren’t required. The enhanced “Essential 3” requires a background re-check, safe environment re-training and re-signing of the appropriate code of conduct every three years. These enhanced requirements will be phased in over the next four years.

The director of the new Office of Ministerial Standards and Safe Environment, Tim O’Malley, who began work last week and attended the first training session, explained the enhancements.

“Protecting our children is so vital that we must continually improve,” he said. “Enhancing the ‘Essential 3’ does just that. It helps us improve. These new requirements will sharpen our processes and will keep kids safer.”

Updated codes of conduct were also discussed at the Safe Environment training sessions. In the final stages of revision are two updated codes of conduct for adults and one new code of conduct for youth volunteers and employees.

Among recommendations released in a report last spring from the Safe Environment and Ministerial Standards Task Force, training should accompany the roll-out of the new codes.

In the archdiocese, there will be a variety of training options, including online training and online code acknowledgment, meaning a person can read and “sign” the code from home or another place with Internet access. Online tracking of the “Essential 3” requirements is also scheduled to be in place for use by parish and Catholic school staff within the coming year.