Caught Between a Duke and a King (or, a royal mess)
Gregg Palmer, Special Education Teacher, Brewer High School
When it comes to spending 3 million dollars to fingerprint over
28,000 innocent teachers and staff there are ten facts on which all parties
can agree.
1. Gov. Angus King and Commissioner of Education Duke
Albanese sing the praises of the state’s teachers. With Maine
kids scoring among the nations best on various tests, the
taxpayers are getting results. At the outset we get a pat on the
head.
2. There have been a few documented cases of sexual abuse
against children in the public schools over the past decade. It
hurts to say that, but it’s true.
3. Maine teachers report and thereby stop more crimes against
kids, and, in the end, save more kids from sexual abuse than
anyone else. More than the police, more than princdipals, or
superintendents, or department of human service employees,
more than Angus King, more than legislators, and yes, even
more than the sanctimonious Duke Albanese. We are the first
line of defense for Maine kids, period.
4. There were 3,746 substantiated cases of child abuse in Maine
in 1997, plus over another 3 thousand that were reported but
never investigated by the state due to lack of funds.
5. The state of Maine wants to spend over 3 million dollars to
open FBI files on all teachers and public school employees.
6. Nearly 85% of all sexual crimes against children are
perpetrated by a family member. About 13% are committed by
strangers. The remaining 2% is a mishmash (lot of firefighters
lately, but no one wants to fingerprint firefighters). Fact is that
teachers and other school employees never make the list,
anywhere. Ever. Statistically they simply are not a part of the
problem.
7. The state of Maine wants to spend over 3 million dollars to
open FBI files on all teachers and public school employees.
8. They won’t fingerprint school volunteers or anyone else who
wanders into a school, including delivery people, guest
lecturers, various agency staff, you name it.
9. Most New England states don’t fingerprint and open FBI files
on teachers, including Massachusetts and New York, and when
states that resemble Maine, such as Kansas and Nebraska,
looked at this issue they rejected fingerprinting outright. Duke
Albanese’s claim that 39 other states do this is misleading.
Maine will be standing nearly alone with this gleefully
reactionary program.
10. Sexual predators do not receive real jail time in Maine, even if
they’re repeat offenders. Check the papers. These guys are
always up on second convictions. Even then they plea bargain
down to a few months or nothing at all. So, when state police
find a predator and the case is given to the few state
prosecutors (and so by extension, when Angus King gets
involved), nothing happens. These people are simply turned
back into the community. Maybe to volunteer at a school, for
instance. In fact, imagine this scenario, which the numbers
prove can happen with some frequency: a student is being
sexually molested; a teacher figures it out and reports it to the
police and department of human services; the perpetrator is
charged; the perpetrator, who is a repeat offender, plea
bargains himself out of any jail time or even a conviction; the
perpetrator is turned loose and reappears at school as a
volunteer; and the state forces the teacher to be fingerprinted.
Understand why we’re upset?
There are other things the state would rather you didn’t know. Like when
Duke
Albanese says 42 public school employees in the past decade have had
convictions to
disqualify them from holding a teaching certificate, he leaves out and
probably wouldn’t
like you to consider the 16 people since 1995 who agreed to surrender their
certificates so
they wouldn’t receive a conviction. So some of the very people who want to
claim the
moral high ground and trumpet saving kids by stripping teachers of their
civil rights
actually knew about 16 potential convictions and agreed to turn these
people loose into
the community. This information comes from Albanese, himself, in a document
ironically titled, "Essential Points: Criminal History Records Checks on Educational
Personnel."
Consider that, as a teacher, I have at least 50 interactions with kids at school every
day. That’s a very low estimation. Just for me, that’s 8,800 interactions per year. For
23,000 teachers the figure is, conservatively, 202,400,000 per year. Now, even Duke
Albanese would put the number of abuse cases in public schools over a decade at a small
handful (you can conclude, from the National Association of State Directors of Teacher
Education and Certification, fewer than one per year in Maine). The number of
interactions teachers have had with kids over the past decade is (again, conservatively),
2,024,000,000. That’s over two billion interactions. To get a perspective, think of these
numbers in terms of miles. The number of convictions might extend from Bangor to
Augusta, with the number of positive, child enhancing (often child saving) interactions
stretching from where you are now to the sun and back a dozen times round trip over the
same decade.
So why do this? You tell me. Politics, maybe. It would be expensive (even more
than the 3 million they are wasting, now) to double or triple the number of
caseworkers at the
Department of Human Services so that some of those 3 thousand forgotten abuse cases
got some attention. Or it’s just too risky to talk about even-handed gun control, for
instance. Much easier to attack teachers, bus drivers, cooks.
Finally, 77% of all teachers feel coerced by their state into having fingerprints
taken. Duke Albanese and Angus King and some legislators are destroying the morale of
those teachers they so praise. The issue is not the $49 it now costs out of our own
pockets, as Duke Albanese would have you believe. A full 7% of teachers currently say
they will resign (or, more accurately, be forced out by the state) before they submit.
Teachers can sign up online at bhuebner@mint.net. That’s nearly 2,000 of the most
diligent watchdogs your kid has. Who will love this law? Pedophiles. The state, who
cares so much, is condemning far more kids to abuse than they’re saving. Maine schools
will be even more understaffed (try hiring a good physics or algebra teacher, lately? I
know several great ones who will be fired for refusing to knuckle under), and the most
dedicated teachers, the most dignified and concerned employees, will go teach in
Vermont, or Mass., or New York, or Nebraska, or Kansas, or many other states. That’s a
fact. Duke Albanese may not like it, but there it is.
Simply put, he and a few others will abandon your or your neighbor’s child to the
abuse these teachers will never detect and prevent. The state will lure you into a false
sense of security while the real predators do as they please.