School worker privacy debated State leaders at odds over fingerprinting

AUGUSTA – A guarantee of full confidentiality for school employees facing the scrutiny of Maine’s mandatory fingerprinting law seemed anything but certain Thursday when key lawmakers demanded detailed criminal background disclosures from the state Department of Education.

Earlier this week, a majority of the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee voted to withhold $900,000 from the current services portion of the budget that would fund the program for the next two years.

The panel took action after officials with the departments of Public Safety and Education declined to provide the lawmakers with information regarding the estimated 29,000 employees fingerprinted on the basis of confidentiality provisions under the 1999 law.

But earlier this month, an apparent slip of the tongue by Maine State Police Col. Michael Sperry revealed that 1,324 school employees – or about 4.5 percent of those investigated thus far – have been determined to have criminal records that could include anything from shoplifting offenses dating back to the 1970s to felonies involving the abuse of children.

When the Criminal Justice Committee attempted to probe the data, Maine Attorney General G. Steven Rowe blocked the request after concluding that the fingerprinting law precluded the release of any information derived from criminal background checks.

The co-chairmen of the Criminal Justice Committee, Sen. Michael McAlevey, R-Waterboro, and Rep. Michael Povich, D-Ellsworth, argued that Rowe’s opinion was narrowly construed and must be challenged in the interests of legislative accountability. To that end, McAlevey said he would be meeting with members of the Education Committee to craft a joint legislative order revising the confidentiality aspects of the fingerprinting law. The measure could be before Maine lawmakers by the end of next week and can’t come soon enough for Povich.

“We just need to have some understanding of where this program is going and if it’s working,” Povich said. “In my mind, there’s a due process question about who’s holding onto the information, which is of a judicial nature, and the Department of Education is not a judicial department. So there’s lots of problems and we need to look at the language in the original bill and maybe tweak it a little.”

To emphasize the seriousness with which it viewed the matter, the Criminal Justice Committee voted to take the program’s funding out of the current services portion of the budget now under review and place it under the new spending segment that will be taken up later in order to give the Appropriations Committee more time to analyze the law. But members of the Appropriations Committee were reportedly not supportive of the committee’s decision and rumors abounded Thursday afternoon that $900,000 would be going back into the current services section.

The fingerprinting law was passed to protect schoolchildren from sexual predators and applies to all school employees, ranging from teaching staff to bus drivers and janitors. In addition to submitting themselves to fingerprinting, employees must agree to a criminal records check through the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Steve Crouse, a lobbyist for the Maine Education Association, said the Department of Education can revoke a teacher’s certification for not participating in the criminal background checks or if the checks show that teachers have been convicted of crimes against children, committed certain felonies within the past five years or misdemeanors that could negatively affect their job performance. Other school employees can be dismissed from their positions if they are found to have committed similar offenses.

With a little more than half of the state’s estimated 50,000 school employees still waiting to be fingerprinted, Crouse said there is considerable anxiety among members of his organization, who fear the Legislature may try to go too far in its efforts to satisfy its concerns about the program’s accountability.

“Will it be broad language to open up the confidentiality section to include all the information or will it be very narrow,” he said. “I think most people agree that the information that includes those people who are disqualified from working in the schools should be very narrow and very limited. Hopefully, we’ll be able to determine what that very narrow language will look like within the next couple of days.”

Gov. Angus S. King and Education Department officials have already signed on to the concept of providing some additional information to the public, a position that McAlevey says, for the moment, places them at odds with the state attorney general. The senator said under current law, even school superintendents are not entitled to know what crime an employee might have committed.

“We’re not interested in who, when or where, specifically,” he said. “But I want to know how many people have been fingerprinted from the department and how many are left, instead of hearing about it in the media. We want to know how many people have resigned and quit rather than be fingerprinted. We’d like to know what category the crimes fall in, how long ago they took place and what the classification of the employee is. And we’d like to know how many people the department plans to decertify. Then we can make an assessment as to whether this program is effective or not. Because if we’re not identifying any sex offenders, what’s the point of spending all this money on the program?”

Yellow Breen, a spokesman for the Department of Education, said Thursday that the department would work with the Legislature to develop aggregate statistics he said will reflect the program’s effectiveness as the ongoing debate grabs the attention of school officials statewide.

Sandy Ervin, Bangor’s superintendent of schools, supports the fingerprinting law because it protects children. To date, he said, the background checks have not revealed any Bangor school employees with criminal histories. But if they did, Ervin said the particulars of a crime were not as important as the need to eliminate undesirable employees.

“I’m not sure I’m entitled to know the gory details of what a person has done,” he said. “But the certification process is the domain of the state and if they say someone can’t be certified, then I’m going to take that and run with it.”