The Value of a Law

After six years on the books and four in practice, the arguments for and against Maine’s fingerprinting law for school personnel are well-known. The criminal background checks that result from the prints are a precaution to keep pedo-philes out of our schools, worth the cost and trouble if they keep just one sexual predator away from our children. Or, they are an unwarranted invasion of civil liberties, an unprovoked insult, an imposition that has caused many good teachers to leave the profession.

Now, there are several bills before the Legislature that would refine – limit fingerprinting to new hires, exempting and rehiring teachers who quit because of philosophical objections – or even eliminate the statute. Gov. Baldacci is firmly against repealing the law and says he is re-examining his campaign position that the checks should be limited to new hires.

Refining and re-examining existing laws is always a good idea; eliminating bad ones an even better idea. These acts require facts, information, data – commodities absent in this case.

The value of this law is that it removes from school employment teachers, administrators and staff with criminal records for child molestation and prevents those with such records from gaining employment. The law itself, however, prohibits the Department of Education from revealing the number of people who have lost their jobs due to the record checks and the number of prospective employees who have been weeded out. To date, just 60 percent of current school personnel have been fingerprinted and checked; to assume the remaining 40 percent can safely be exempted or that any who quit can safely be rehired is simply guessing.

Before this law is changed in any other way, it must be changed to allow this information to be made public. The names of individuals removed or prohibited from school employment can remain confidential; what is important is how many there are of them. While there is some truth to the assertion by advocates of the law that it has value even if it keeps just one pedophile out of our schools, it remains unproven that this law has done even that. If it has, the higher the number the greater the value and the easier the imposition is to accept. Education Commissioner Susan Gendron and Dick Gray, president of the Maine School Boards Association, both support legislation that would make these statistics public while protecting individuals’ names. So should lawmakers.

This law was enacted with the best of intentions – it came in response to a few high-profile cases of molestation by school personnel. It also was enacted in haste – not nearly enough advance work was done to win over school personnel, the clumsy, aggravating and time-consuming way the initial rounds of fingerprinting were done added considerably and understandably to their anger, some good teachers resigned in disgust. An accounting of how well this law has protected children at school can determine whether it was worth it.