When Attorney General Andrew Ketterer initiated his Civil Rights Project for Maine schools two years ago, the purpose was to create a mechanism through which students targeted for racial, ethnic, religious or sexual reasons can alert someone of the harassment before it escalates to violence.

By the time the project reached the Machias School Board last week, “mechanism” had become “truth squads” and “alert” was “ratting out.”

Machias’ decision to pass is not a case of a small-town board failing to take seriously the problem of intolerance. Ketterer’s project, though noble in concept, is flawed in a way that sometimes is only seen in real life at the local level.

The project has two components: train volunteer students in issues of bias so they can become effective voices for tolerance; since harassed students often find it difficult to take their concerns to teachers and administrators, these teams of students would recognize and report prejudicial speech and acts before they result in violence.

The first part is fine. Thanks to what passes for popular culture, today’s students are exposed to a horrendous amount of ugly, crass ideas and it could help to have respected peers convey the message that it’s not cool to be stupid. The other part, the reporting, the alerting, is where the trouble starts.

If students being harassed feel they — or their parents — cannot take their concerns about threatening words and deeds to teachers and administrators and get relief, the problem has been identified. Any school that does not have staff able to handle such matters professionally and in confidentiality needs to get some. It takes training to know when an inflammatory situation can be handled internally anmd quietly, and when outside agencies, such as the police, need to be called in. That’s training that should come with an education degree, not from a weekend retreat.

The use of student intermediaries only adds a layer of hearsay. If the aggrieved student wants relief, he or she eventually will have to talk to those with the authority to actually do something, and the sooner the better.

The biggest problem with Ketterer’s project is that threatening, harassment and terrorizing are crimes, not merely boorish behavior. Using student teams as the first component of investigating what could end up being prosecuted as a crime simply creates too much potential for mischief. Unfounded allegations, rumor-mongering and malicious prosecutions are enough of a problem in the adult world — high-school and middle-school students should not be put under that kind of pressure.

Instead of signing on to the Civil Rights Project, the Machias School Board has asked students at administrators to develop their own program. Perhaps what they come up with can be a model for others — peer influence used as a positive force to combat the darkness of intolerence and the forging of trusting relationships between students and educators that can bring both safety and justice.