No priors

Fingerprinting school personnel is designed to ferret out pedophiles and give parents comfort that we don’t have child-molesting people dealing with our children. But, in striving for this laudable goal, we have embarked on a costly an counter-productive frenzy. It is a classic example of a bureaucracy run amok, of addressing an assumed problem by the wrong method. It is ready, fire, aim.

Does anybody really think that there are convicted pedophiles in our schools? If there are, then school-hiring personnel have done a poor job of screening candidates.

I have heard Gov. King speak on the issue, and he has cited new violations. In all the examples cited, there were no prior convictions, so that fingerprinting is and would have been useless.

Rep. Shirley Richard of Madison cited four cases of child molestation in the past month while the fingerprinting debate was taking place. Since the Department of Education can not, by law, reveal the results of their background checks, I can only assume that Rep. Richard was citing recent cases that have come to light. In none of those cases was there a prior conviction. In none of those cases would fingerprinting matter.

The Department of Education says Maine is one of 40 or so states that fingerprint school personnel. What it doesn’t tell us, is that Maine is the only state to fingerprint existing school personnel retroactively. This is a big difference. It is much more conventional, probably desirable, to do a criminal background check before hiring a new employee. It makes no sense to do a criminal background check after an employee has been employed for 20 years.

Terry St. Peter

Belfast