House votes in favor of fingerprinting bill

AUGUSTA – Members of the Maine House voted 75-54 Tuesday in favor of a bill that limits current mandatory criminal background checks for school personnel to new hires only. Should the Senate join the House in its preliminary approval of the measure, the Legislature will be on a collision course with Gov. John E. Baldacci, who has promised to veto the legislation if it reaches his desk.

“Nothing has changed as far as we’re concerned,” said Lee Umphrey, the governor’s spokesman.

The House vote was the first official action on LD 890 since the Legislature’s Education Committee gave the bill a 9-4 affirmative vote. Officials with the Maine Education Association estimate about 80 percent of Maine’s teachers already have complied with the state’s phased-in 1999 law, leaving around 4,000 teachers who still must be fingerprinted. The teachers union estimates that 45 teachers have left the profession as a matter of conscience rather than submit to a law viewed by many as professionally demeaning and personally humiliating. Proponents maintain it is the only way to ensure sexual predators will be kept out of Maine schools.

Currently, any incriminating personal information obtained as a result of the background checks is classified and the aggregate numbers on the criminal histories of teachers and other school employees are known only to a handful of key government officials.

Like other members of the public, Maine legislators are out of the information loop because of the confidentiality provisions and remain suspicious of criminal details known only to the law’s most ardent supporters. Baldacci has signaled he would support a minor change in the law permitting aggregate criminal background check information to be shared with lawmakers.

But that revision has not surfaced as a separate bill or as an amendment to LD 890, and one prominent Democratic leader said that given what little would be gained by the governor’s suggested alteration, it would be better left unoffered.

“All it would be is aggregate information offering no distinctions, and then the headlines would read, ‘1,000 Maine teachers rejected because of sex crimes,'” he said.

During Tuesday’s House debate, Rep. Mary Ellen Ledwin, R-Holden, emphasized that four-fifths of Maine’s school personnel already had complied willingly with the background checks knowing “that they were helping protect the children.”

“It seems to me that we’re not giving them very much respect when we cancel what we have and do just new hires,” she said. “Forty-one states have enacted legislation requiring fingerprinting and that fingerprinting has become the national standard.”

Rep. Glenn A. Cummings, a Portland Democrat who serves as House chairman of the Education Committee on which Ledwin is assigned, responded to the Republican’s remarks with what Ledwin later described as an unfair characterization of her position. Cummings sided with the majority of his committee on the bill while Ledwin was in the minority.

“Let me briefly explain the rationale for the overwhelming majority of the Education Committee members who believe that Maine teachers are not criminals – and they ought to,” Cumming said during the one-hour debate. “We believe we ought to have applied a more thoughtful and intelligent method of making our children safe, and if we had done so, we wouldn’t be in this quagmire that we’re now in.”

Later in the debate, Ledwin rose to confront her committee chairman who she said had insinuated that she believed Maine teachers are criminals.

“I do not believe that Maine teachers are criminals,” she said. “I have the utmost respect for Maine teachers and teachers in any other part of this country. I am a teacher, I’m very proud to be a teacher and I’m very upset by that insinuation. And this is not a teacher’s bill – it’s a school personnel bill so we need to qualify that. This is not just about teachers.”

The bill faces additional votes in the House and Senate. The House also voted 87-40 against LD 653, which would have repealed the background check law entirely. A third fingerprinting bill, LD 1250, which would granted exemptions under the law to some school personnel, was rejected without debate or a formal vote.