While my efforts to persuade the Board of Selectmen, the town manager, and the Rec Department director to allocate permits in a more equitable fashion, and to use their power to make sure that the programs using town - owned facilities met minimum standards for inclusiveness and safety, fell on deaf ears (we ended up being forced to use for our home games a dusty field the high school had essentially abandoned), I returned to a discussion of the «power of the venue permit» 10 years
later in my 2006 book, Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers in Youth Sports, where I suggested that one of the best ways for youth sports parents to improve the safety of privately - run sports programs in their communities was to lobby their elected officials to utilize that power to «reform youth sports by exercising public oversight over the use of taxpayer - funded fields, diamonds, tracks, pools, and courts, [and] deny permits to programs that fail to abide by a [youth sports] charter» covering such topics as
background checks, and codes of
conduct for coaches, players, and parents.
In a related story reported on ESR News, the private contractor that
conducted a security clearance
background check on Edward Snowden in 2011 that gave him access to classified documents from the National Security Agency (NSA) that he
later leaked to the media is under investigation by the federal government for allegedly
conducting inadequate
background checks.