BELFAST – The SAD 34 board of directors is trying to rally other school boards and legislators from around the state to overturn the teacher fingerprinting law.

Board chairman Kathy Gleeson confirmed Monday that she was in the process of sending letters to school districts across the state asking them to support the fledgling movement. The letters come on the heels of the board’s decision last week to speak out against the law. The SAD 34 board is the first in the state to formally vote against the controversial policy.

“We are committed to getting the law changed, and we really hope that other boards and the Legislature will follow through on this,” said Gleeson. “Involved citizens are effective agents of change.”

Besides the letter to most of the approximately 300 school districts in the state, the board also has addressed its concerns to Gov. Angus King, Commissioner of Education J. Duke Albanese, and the local legislators – Sen. Susan Longley, D-Liberty, Rep. Walter Ash, D-Belfast, and Rep. Donald Berry, R-Belmont.

In the letter, Gleeson and board members contend that the statutory requirements to fingerprint and conduct criminal background checks on teachers was having “unintended consequences” on the district’s ability to retain teachers.

In SAD 34, four teachers have filed for early retirement as a result of the law and another has indicated he will not comply with the edict to be fingerprinted.

Teacher Steven Smith, who has been teaching history at Belfast Area High School for the past 19 years, appeared before the board last week to commend its members for their opposition to the law. Smith has refused to be fingerprinted and has joined with 60 or so other like-minded teachers to form Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting, an activist group working to repeal the law.

Smith compared the law to a witch hunt and said that teachers were being scapegoated to relieve society’s anxieties about child abuse. He noted that to agree with the law would be to agree that every teacher, administrator, secretary, bus driver, custodian and school lunch worker is a suspect who is guilty until proved innocent.

“When we remember that 85 percent of child abuse is in the home, that less than half of 1 percent is in the schools, and that the majority of abusers caught in the school setting have no previous record, we realize that this law cannot have a significant impact on child abuse,” Smith told the board.Gleeson said the school board agrees with many of the arguments voiced by Smith and other members of MEAF. The law has forced the board to replace some skilled and experienced teachers almost overnight, she said.

Gleeson said that under the law, teacher certification automatically expires at the end of June. Teachers have 60 days to be recertified provided they have had their fingerprints taken. By then it would be September and the beginning of the 2001-02 school year. Because it was against the law for a school superintendent to knowingly hire an uncertified teacher it was unlikely a superintendent would put that job in jeopardy even in an effort to retain a teacher, she said.

“I doubt anybody would agree to hire an uncertified teacher,” she said.

In their letter to elected officials and school boards across the state, the SAD 34 board noted that the Belfast district was “experiencing a loss of dedicated and effective faculty members to early retirement and resignation by teachers who are prepared to lose their teaching credentials rather than to submit to what they consider an unwarranted intrusion into their personal lives.”

Gleeson noted that in Smith’s case he was fingerprinted when he served in the military in the Vietnam era. She said it was not only the fingerprinting he and the others opposed.

“Their objections are firmly rooted in the belief that background checks of teachers who have worked many years under public scrutiny, with no evidence of behavior that create risks for students, constitutes unreasonable search,” she stated in the letter.

In conclusion, the board stated, “The outcome of lost credentials for teachers unwilling to comply with the investigative requirements are not consistent with human dignity and the civil liberties that we hold dear as citizens of Maine and the United States of America.”