MCPS does background check on security team leader...AFTER he is arrested for alleged sex with Richard Montgomery student

Michael Christopher Yantsos
was hired by MCPS without a
background check

How safe are your kids in Montgomery County Public Schools? Parents have been pondering that question in recent weeks, after a 14-year-old girl was allegedly gang-raped by two illegal immigrants in a bathroom at Rockville High School, and two other girls were violently assaulted there in the weeks prior to that incident. MCPS Superintendent Jack Smith, who has shown more rage toward his critics than toward the alleged rapists, assured us last week that every MCPS school was safe. But today, Montgomery County police announced they have arrested an MCPS security team leader, Mark Christopher Yantsos, 57,  for allegedly having sexual contact with a 17-year-old student at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville.

Oops.

Smith then compounded that news by announcing later this morning that "it has come to our attention that in 1994, Mr. Yantsos was accused of using his revolver to menace a female while working for the New York Police Department." According to a 1994 New York Times report on that incident, Yantsos was attempting to "pick up" the 30-year-old woman after drinking "10 to 15 shots of tequila" at the Happy Go Lucky "topless bar."

What we've just learned, is that MCPS didn't do a background check on a security team leader before hiring him. You can't make this stuff up, folks.

Smith - or more accurately, whoever found the 1994 report and forwarded it to him - then proudly declares he's just done a background check on an employee...after the employee has allegedly had sex with an MCPS student. The same Smith, who with his friends on the County Council, spent more time raging at their constituents and playing national partisan politics than addressing the rape victim or student safety since the gang rape was reported.

This is the sort of amateur hour condoned by both the Board of Education, and the County Council. Unreal. If there was any question Jack Smith needed to step down, that question was answered today.

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Detectives are requesting that parents of students who attend Richard Montgomery High School talk to their children about their interactions with Mark Christopher Yantsos, and contact SVID detectives at 240-773-5400 if they believe their child was victimized.