King holds upper hand in print law Opponents of background checks remain; 64 teachers have resigned

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The score stands at 64-0.

So far, 64 teachers have quit rather than be fingerprinted under the state law ordering school employee background checks.

Zero information has been released on the kinds of court convictions the law has unearthed. So the public is unable to judge whether the law is succeeding in its central purpose of weeding out child molesters.

The issues surrounding the law reignited in the Legislature this session, and when the smoke cleared early Friday morning, attempts both to repeal it and to release general information about what it was uncovering lay in ashes.

“We’re still in the exact position where no information can be released at all. That’s one of the ironies of it all,” lamented Gov. Angus King on Friday, a day after the Senate sustained his veto of a bill that would have repealed the law.

Republican Betty Lou Mitchell of Etna, Senate chairwoman of the Education Committee, said, “The most frustrating part is that we wanted people to know. We thought the information should be out there.”

Early Friday morning, before the Legislature adjourned this year’s session, the Senate let a bill die that would have carried over to next year the issue of releasing data from the background checks.

The strength with which the repeal effort erupted this spring took many people aback, including implacable opponents of the law.

“I was as surprised as anyone,” said Bernard Huebner, leader of Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting. The former Skowhegan Area High School teacher said he is quitting teaching in Maine because of the law.

Huebner and others in his group oppose the law on civil rights grounds, saying it is an invasion of their privacy and casts unwarranted suspicion over all school employees.

He and two others met with the governor for more than two hours Tuesday evening, in what Huebner called a “completely open and sincere discussion” that failed to budge anyone from their positions.

King told the Bangor Daily News on Friday: “It’s awful that a good teacher would quit over this. It’s a tragic misunderstanding.”

In the letter accompanying his veto of the repeal legislation, King said, “The background check is a device for prevention, not accusation.” The fingerprinting and FBI background checks are “sensible safeguards to protect our children and our educational resources from individuals with proven criminal convictions,” he continued.

But, Huebner counters, “We don’t think it is going to protect children worth a damn.”

His organization cites statistics from a federal report showing that parents commit 87 percent of all child abuse. The same report, Child Maltreatment 1999, which was released in March, shows that among “professional sources,” education personnel are the No. 1 group in reporting child abuse, slightly ahead of both law enforcement and social services personnel.

One of the central forces for the unexpected uprising that put the repeal on the governor’s desk was the freshman lawmakers in the House.

“Almost all of the [42] House freshmen were for repeal,” said Rep. James Skoglund, D-St. George, a former teacher and adamant opponent of the law.

Rep. Joseph Bruno of Raymond, the Republican floor leader, said that last fall there was “a lot of pressure” on candidates from the Maine Education Association, the statewide teachers’ union, to come out in opposition to the law.

In the governor’s view, the revived revolt is a manifestation of term limits.

The new legislators “never heard the debate before, so we had to do it all over again,” King said.

He also cited the dogged tenacity of Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting.

“There’s a theory of politics that says a passionate minority will beat a lackadaisical majority,” King said about the impassioned opposition and an inattentive majority that supports the law.

Sen. Mitchell cited factors that led to teacher outrage last year, when King also vetoed a measure to repeal the law.

The fingerprinting law was enacted in 1997 after two years of discussion among lawmakers, a time of heightened awareness of the threat of sexual violence against children. But Maine lawmakers delayed implementation until 2000, and required that teachers foot the $49 cost of the fingerprinting and background checks.

“We shouldn’t have had an unfunded mandate,” Mitchell said.

That gave impetus to the resistance, and led the MEA to change its stance on the law from toleration to opposition.

The opposition continued to gain strength even after the Legislature agreed to pay the $49.

Despite the repeal attempts, between 29,500 and 35,250 school employees have been fingerprinted out of the 47,000 who are required to undergo background checks, according to Maine Department of Education projections from last year.

When asked whether those figures show that most people are willing to live with the law, Huebner said, “If you have kids in college and a mortgage, it takes a very brave person to put their job on the line. If you’re 24 with student loans and a new baby, what are you going to do? Stand on the corner selling pencils?”

Suzanne Malis-Andersen taught social studies in Brewer schools for 14 years before allowing her certification to lapse last summer because she refused to submit to fingerprinting.

“I haven’t looked for work,” she said. “I felt confident we’d have the law repealed this year and I could go back to teaching.”

When several school boards faced with the loss of teachers began to call for the law’s abolition this spring, Malis-Andersen said, “I felt the tide was definitely turning.”

Despite setbacks two years running, she said, “Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting is not going away. We all feel too passionately about this, and we might have success with a different governor.”

King’s term ends in January 2003.

Bruno said that whether the law is repealed or stays hangs on the still unknown figures about the kinds of convictions it is turning up.

In February, the state police said that the background checks had found that 1,329 school personnel had some kind of convictions that jeopardized their jobs. Almost immediately afterward, the attorney general stated that all information pertaining to the fingerprinting and background checks was confidential.

“If there are 1,300 people with some kind of infraction and it turns out 1,299 are traffic offenses, I think we’ll see it repealed,” Bruno said.