At some future time, when tempers have cooled and concerns allayed, the ongoing uproar over fingerprinting and background checks for Maine school employees will make an excellent case study for civics classes on how not to make law.

It’s hard to find one aspect of this situation that’s not been bungled, and the result is that what started as resolvable objections to a $49 fee has exploded into full-blown civil liberties protests and outright refusals to obey the law from one side; save the children platitudes and my way or the highway intransigence from the other.

When the first objections to the fee surfaced last fall, so many lawmakers and education officials, from the governor on down, said they could not recall how this law came into being that one could reasonably doubt whether such a law actually existed.

It does. It was enacted four years ago and, because there was no money attached to the legislation, it attracted little attention until the implementation started this school year. If that time gap was intended to shield lawmakers from the inevitable abuse rightfully heaped upon those who impose unfunded mandates, it has had exactly the opposite effect. And when all many school employees needed was firm statements from lawmakers that the state would do what reasonable employers do and pick up the tab, they got vague promises that it would be looked into.

But the time gap does more than support the protestors’ assertion that lawmakers tried to pull a fast one — it effectively demolishes the argument that full and immediate compliance by current school employees is necessary to protect children from the predators in their midst. If this threat is real, the four-year delay in implementation was unconscionable sacrifice of the well-being of children to political expediency. It may well be true that this law — the expense, the inconvenience and the sacrifice of some individual liberty — is a small price to pay for a greater good. If so, it was equally true four years ago.

Add to this sleight-of-hand and false cry of urgency numerous other missteps — such as the Department of Education’s well-meaning but dreadfully mishandled attempt to reach out to unhappy teachers, the failure of supporters of this law to back up their claim that Maine could become a haven for molesters, the law’s unacceptable lack of specificity regarding precisely what past offenses might be cause for dismissal — and the situation calls out for compromise.

The best compromise remains amending this law to test — for now, at least — only new hires. If this does, in fact, prevent undesirables from working in the schools, the law can then be expanded to existing staff. And if this can be done in the light of day, with full and open debate and with the concerns of those affected addressed from the start, an important lesson in civics will have been learned.