Level 2 screening applies to people in positions of trust and responsibility with children, the elderly and people with disabilities. That includes child care staff, foster and adoptive parents, staff of licensed treatment providers, and a wide range of contracted roles.
It also reaches beyond paid staff: adult household members in a foster or adoptive home are screened, as are some volunteers with unsupervised access. This page is a plain-language guide. Licences, applications and eligibility decisions are handled by the State of Florida through its own official channels.
Fingerprints taken electronically at an approved live scan vendor, checked against state and federal criminal history records, and compared against additional registries.
It is fingerprint-based rather than name-based, which is why it takes longer than a commercial background check and why it cannot be done from a copy of an ID.
The Care Provider Background Screening Clearinghouse is a shared results database used by several state agencies. Its purpose is to let one set of fingerprints serve more than one employer, so a person moving between qualifying jobs does not have to be reprinted every time.
It only works if an employer registers the employment relationship in the system. If they do not, the previous result is not visible to them and a new screening is required.
Screening does not last indefinitely. A retained result stays usable while an employment relationship is recorded and while the person is resubmitted on the required cycle; a gap in employment beyond the allowed period means starting again with new fingerprints.
The practical advice is dull but effective: keep a record of the date you were printed, and do not assume an employer has maintained the registration on your behalf.
Certain offences disqualify a person from a position of trust. Disqualification is not always permanent: for many offences a person may apply for an exemption once the sentence and any supervision have been completed and a set period has passed.
An exemption is decided on the individual — the offence, how long ago it was, what has happened since — and the burden is on the applicant to show rehabilitation. The exemption page in this section explains how the request is put together.