Cue the Dragnet theme:

Cory Allen Heidelberger shows the fingerprints and $43.25 he has to submit for his criminal background check to become a teacher in South Dakota.

C.A. Heidelberger, professeur de français... ou hooligan?

Have you seen this man? The state Division of Criminal Investigation soon will.

I have happily gained employment as the new French teacher at Spearfish High School. However, gaining this employment requires that I submit fingerprints and pay Pierre $43.25 for a criminal background check.

Teachers didn't use to have to pay for this check; schools just picked up the cost as a regular part of doing business and making sure we aren't hiring members of SPECTRE to teach our children. When the nice people in the business office said I had to pay my own money to prove my innocence, I was briefly surprised.

But then I remembered: Russ Olson changed that for me during this year's legislative session. Despite his certainty that schools are filled with waste and overregulation, he couldn't think of any really big cost savings for the schools. Instead, his House Bill 1208 nibbled around the fiscal edges and shifted costs from the state to individuals.

Russ Olson said he wouldn't raise taxes, but he just raised my payments to government by $43.25. Typical Olson thinking: don't take a cut from the big-money voters, but whack teacher pay and charge them extra before they conjugate a single verb.

Fear not, gentle readers: I do not anticipate this new job creating major blog changes. Kristi Noem is still my Congresswoman, and someone's got to give her guff. But permit me to note the irony of finding myself working for... SHS.

Update 08:59 CDT: I can guarantee DCI won't turn up any DUIs on my record... unlike the school superintendent at Wessington Springs, who just got his fifth.