Value of fingerprinting

Maine’s fingerprinting law for school staff started off badly with administrative problems, ran smack into angry teachers who would rather lose their jobs than submit to the new law, then found rejection in the House and faces a similar snub in the Senate. Lawmakers need to step back from the debate, remember that there is nothing new in checking employee backgrounds and keep in mind the point of the program is to protect children.

Background checks and fingerprinting are not a civil-liberties issue and they are not an accusation of wrongdoing. The session’s debate brought forth a half dozen examples of professions that require similar or more intrusive checks. School staff members have been asked for years on their job applications whether they have criminal records but no one has raised a stink about that. The fingerprinting and background checks are simple and relatively inexpensive ways to verify personal information the staff already has been providing.

With deference to the teachers who are protesting the new law as an issue of civil rights, the underlying disagreement seems to grow from three areas: The background checks came as a surprise, with first the four-year implementation delay and then the rush to get them completed unexplained. The uncertainty in the Legislature about why such checks were necessary made them appear capricious. And many teachers believe the public does not respect the work they do, making the process of fingerprinting, with all its negative connotations, seem like an added insult – doubly so when the initial $49 charge was included.

There is substance to these concerns, and reason for the Department of Education to find teachers and other school staff willing to help improve the background-check process. But the initial impulse to check that the information provided by staff is accurate and that convicted sexual predators are kept out of schools remains valid. The measure, with limited disclosure as proposed by the department, is especially important now that most other states have similar background checks, excluding the predators from schools in those places.

Maine risks losing many fine teachers because of an initial administrative mishandling and from misconceptions about what the background checks represent. But neither of these reasons is sufficient to kill a program designed to do nothing more than ensure that important information public employees report on their job applications is, in fact, true.