Educators feel used and abused by fingerprint law

It is time for educators to voice their concerns regarding the police check/fingerprint law being imposed upon them. I believe the statute sets disturbing precedents about which there seems to have been scant public debate. Many of the educators I know feel they are being used and abused by the Legislature and the Department of Education, yet cannot protest without being cast as untrustworthy suspects.

I first understood that the reasonable goal was to identify all convicted child abusers at the point of state certification or recertification and thus deny such persons contact with students. A close look at legislative and departmental documents reveals, however, that these checks call for ITAL any UNITAL record of conviction to be passed on to the Education Department’s certification office. While one can make a case for a degree of latitude (OUI convictions are relevant to a bus driver’s fitness for employment), there is undeniably a “fishing expedition” quality to the law. Does this mean, then, that a conviction for criminal trespass as part of a Vietnam era act of civil disobedience makes one unfit to teach? Will tax law infractions be seen as relevant, or some day convictions for disturbing the peace?

But maybe we are not dealing here only with convictions. Shall details of a teacher’s DNA profile eventually be used to label him or her a potential abuser? Those who think this fear farfetched should listen closely to Commissioner of Education Duke Albanese’s testimony in support of the bill, when he declares, “A further effect of this provision would also give the department authority to take action when we receive allegations of physical or sexual abuse…” Not convictions, notice, but only allegations. Elsewhere he speaks passionately of making sure “that Maine schools are free of individuals who might do harm to children.” Not “have done,” notice, but “might do.”

Or once the boundaries of suspicion have thus been blurred, when might sexual orientation finally come under scrutiny and disapproval, thus denying the public the services of all the law-abiding gay and lesbian teachers who are no more a threat to their students than their law-abiding heterosexual colleagues? When might so-called “lifestyle” issues be used to make an official determination of a teacher’s fitness?

What underscores the danger here is our habit of cooperating with questionable means to a laudable end. It’s not the inconvenience of the check, but the easy acceptance of what amounts to an unwarranted personal search that deserves more thought. For where is all this leading? All the police checks in the world will not prevent a single first-time abuse. And what about the thousands of parent volunteers? Don’t we need to fingerprint and check them, too? And so the pressure will grow to try to look deeper and deeper. It is not unlike discovering you have a few mice in your house, and then proceeding to club holes in all the walls in order to locate them. You will likely find some of the mice, but at the cost of enormous damage to the structure you were trying to preserve.

But, you protest, neither the Legislature nor the Director of Certification thinks this way. No, they probably don’t, although Commissioner Albanese’s language gives me pause. But what about the next Legislature, perhaps reacting Columbine-style to some dreadful, but unpreventable incident? Or the next director, who, I suppose answers to the commissioner? It sure looks like a slippery slope to me, with a medieval dukedom at the bottom.

Of course, if we knew that there were dozens of cases of students suffering at the hands of undiscovered convicts, such a search might be more defensible. But the former Chairperson of the Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs has said that she recalls no numbers being offered by advocates of the legislation, only anecdotes. Queries to state offices about how many individuals with child abuse convictions repeated such abuses while employed by Maine schools were unsuccessful.

But the real problem with unbridled scrutiny of education personnel goes still deeper. Drug-sniffing dogs are already being used to check student lockers in some Maine schools, on the sad presumption that all students are guilty of the misdemeanor of possession of drugs until proven innocent. The police check/fingerprint law takes the remarkable parallel position that the state — and thus the public — assumes that all school personnel are guilty of child abuse (and who knows what all else?) until they prove themselves innocent. For many of Maine’s tens of thousands of school employees, I believe this is patently offensive. But it is much more important to recognize what such a position does to the historically positive relationship between the public and its schools. Society has long asked its schools to undertake in loco parentis responsibility. For the state suddenly to adopt a position of implicit and pervasive mistrust of all school personnel undoes this vital relationship.

To ask that educators be competent is one thing; to ask that they prove they are not child abusers is quite another. In a Kafkaesque way, the public is led to suspect us, the objects of state scorn.

Suzanne Malis-Andersen has put her career on the line to help the rest of us get started talking. Maybe other educators and school personnel will voice their views before this thing takes its toll.

Bernard Huebner lives in Waterville.