News story with legs still walking

In a world of 24-hour news, round and round a story goes and where it stops nobody knows.

Such is the case concerning the recent reports that some Maine teachers have been espousing anti-war sentiments in class and, in the process, upsetting the children of recently deployed Maine National Guard members.

As they say in the nonstop news business, this story’s got legs, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be giving out anytime soon. Maine teachers, and by implication the rest of us as well, now have a nationwide reputation as “liberal pinko commies” and worse. And while there’s no telling where the story will end, we have an idea how it started and how it got this far.

It began with a news broadcast last Friday on WABI-TV, during which the reporter, Alan Grover, spoke with National Guard officials who have been traveling the state to provide support for families of Guard troops on active duty.

“What the kids are facing is hearing that their mother or father is a bad person for taking part in the confrontation with Iraq,” Grover said, “comments that are coming from teachers.”

On Monday, Department of Education Commissioner J. Duke Albanese talked with Maj. Gen. Joseph Tinkham of the Maine National Guard about complaints from parents across the state who felt “people weren’t being as sensitive as they could be.” When contacted by the NEWS on Monday, Albanese said that of the three or four “anecdotal stories” that Tinkham related, only one had to do with a teaching assistant who “took up the anti-war side” and upset a child. The other complaints, Alabanese said, were from parents who thought school personnel “should have been more sensitive” when a student requested to leave early for a military-related activity and when another was teased on a school bus for being an Army child.

Neither Tinkham nor Albanese would identify the guilty parties, their schools, or exactly what inflammatory words were spoken in the classrooms or the schoolyards that might have upset the kids. Albanese then sent an e-mail to schools throughout the state that urged educators to be mindful of how they talked to students about the possible war in Iraq.

“That’s great news,” said Army National Guard spokesman Maj. Peter Rogers on Monday. “I think a lot of it was probably that people weren’t thinking, and hopefully this will fix the problem.”

But it wasn’t over yet.

By the next day, the Maine Guard had a total of 12 complaints from parents around the state whose children had come home from school upset about remarks that “the pending war in Iraq is unethical, and anybody who would fight that war is also unethical.”

Yet the state’s military and education officials still would not release any details that might shed light on precisely what was going on in the schools and put an end to all the speculation and rumor. They insisted that they didn’t have the particulars regarding how many of the offensive comments came from teachers, other school personnel or students. They were equally vague about how many of the comments were made in the classrooms, schoolyards or on the buses.

Meanwhile, the original TV report was working its way through the World Wide Web, stirring shock and indignation across the country. The Wall Street Journal’s online editorial page told of the “disturbing” report of Army kids as young as 7 years old being harassed by heartless “anti-war” teachers up in Maine. On Thursday, a Washington Times story about the scandal ran under a headline that read: When Maine sends Guard to war, anti-war teachers taunt their children.” The story went on to quote unnamed “National Guard officials” who said they had received “over 30 complaints that name schools and individual principals, teachers and guidance counselors.”

Perhaps those anonymous Guard officials should have followed protocol and revealed a few of those important details to Tinkham, their adjutant general, who continues to insist that he cannot cite specific examples of taunting. Neither can our governor, for that matter, nor our education commissioner – at least publicly.

On Wednesday night, the Maine story was shared with millions of viewers of the popular “O’Reilly Factor” TV show. By Thursday, the syndicated conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh had gotten hold of the Washington Times story and launched into a rant about an unsubstantiated number of anonymous Maine teachers who were traumatizing innocent children with unspecified comments in unnamed schools. Naturally, that got the phones ringing and the e-mails surging into newspaper offices like this one, all from incensed radio listeners across the country who could not believe what they’d just heard. By Thursday night, Internet message boards of a conservative persuasion were filling fast with anti-Maine sentiment that made the label “liberal pinko commies” seem mild by comparison.

Maj. Peters, the Guard spokesman at the center of it all, said Thursday night that he didn’t know how the 12 complaints had managed to balloon so rapidly and mysteriously into more than 30.

“I really have no idea where that figure came from,” he said, referring to the Washington Times report. “I can verify only a dozen, which is bad enough. The whole thing seems to have broken loose.”

Rogers said he caught only a part of Limbaugh’s radio tirade on Thursday, but its message came through loud and clear.

“I was doing another live interview at the time, so I didn’t hear it all,” he said, “but Rush was obviously enraged that schools would do this and he echoed a lot of what he was hearing from around the nation.”

Rogers said he has been interviewed by Ollie North, Pat Buchanan and a slew of other talk-show hosts from around the country, which suggests that the firestorm will continue for a while longer. Now that the story has taken on a life of its own, he said, a big part of his job is keep the political spin to a minimum.

“The one question I’m asked most often is whether all the teachers in Maine are liberals,” he said. “What I’m trying to get across at this point is that these are isolated incidents, and that 99.9 percent of our teachers are doing a great job. The feeling I’m getting back is that people are not negative on Maine, as a whole, but on the individuals responsible.”

What individuals? What schools? Inquiring minds want to know.

“We’re not interested in pointing fingers,” he said. “All we want is for the incidents to stop, and we think they have. We haven’t gotten any more complaints since the education commissioner sent his e-mail to the schools. I think the issue has stopped. I hope it has, at least.”

If so, it would be the best news we’ve heard all week.