Editorials from MAINE TIMES
Continuum by PETER COX 3/04/2000
Fingerprinting will become a blot on Maine history
Contact Peter Cox at pcox@gwi.net
One of Maine's greatest assets is that personal actions count. Because we
tend to know one another, how an individual conducts himself or herself is
how one is judged. A person earns a reputation for trustworthiness over a
number of years, in response to how that individual treats others.
As much as I try to avoid introducing the personal and emotional into policy
debate, and as much as my wife, Eunice, is going to protest this section of
my column, I need to tell you about her to make my point.
We came to Bath together 35 years ago, having recently been married, and
have lived in the Bath-Brunswick area ever since. After our two children
were school age, she came to work at Maine Times as an editor and writer.
After I sold the paper in 1985, she did volunteer work, helping to found the
Tedford Shelter for the homeless in Brunswick and as an Aids volunteer
bringing the marvelous Bert LeClair into our lives before he died. She
volunteered at Pat Clark's excellent Super K (kindergarten) in Topsham - and
when the administration would not adequately fund the program they would
later claim as a great success, she helped raise the money to keep it alive.
Her love of working with children brought her back to the schools. Since
even as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate from the University of Rochester she did
not have the certification credentials to become a teacher, she became an ed
tech, starting as a teacher's aide, then working with problem students, and
now running the computer lab in Woolwich.
I am extremely proud of her accomplishments and strongly believe she has
helped make the communities in which we have lived better places.
Now the Department of Education comes along and says what she has done in
the past is of no consequence; she as an individual is of no consequence.
Representing the epitome of everything that is bad about bureaucracy, the
Department of Education's fingerprinting bill says she will be treated not
as an individual, but as a piece of paper.
In a late-in-the-day attempt to stem the criticism, Education Commissioner
Duke Albanese has claimed that 42 felons were hired by schools, without
their knowledge, in the past decade. That's four a year out of a workforce
of 35,000. Twenty-seven had sexually related convictions. Seven with
convictions lied on their applications.
Even on their face, these figures raise more questions than they answer. If
only seven lied on their applications, does that mean the other 20 weren't
even asked? And how many of these people committed criminal acts again?
Would they have been discovered through normal screening procedures? How
many would have been located only by fingerprinting?
Then there is the similar last-ditch argument that it is worth trampling on
the constitutional rights of school employees and denigrating their
reputations "if it saves only one child from abuse." This borders on
demagoguery and plays on the hysterical side of the child abuse issue.
Remember recovered memory and the parents and child care workers falsely
accused of molestation? The talk show hosts, then the unquestioning press,
then prosecutors and even juries joined the hysteria that injured hundreds
of innocent people before it had run its course. And it didn't prevent a
single instance of child abuse.
Indeed, the administration is willing to spend the $3 million only for
fingerprinting. That money could be spent on proven child abuse prevention
programs in schools that are more effective.
In the meantime, I don't see the administration or the Legislature seriously
considering a ban on handguns or even taking away the vehicles of repeat OUI
offenders on the grounds it is worth it to "save just one life." Many more
people are killed - the ultimate abuse - by guns or cars than are molested
by school employees.
I still don't understand the impetus for the original bill, but I do
understand that it is so badly flawed as to be ridiculous, particularly in
the section that says a person who has not changed jobs is to be
periodically rechecked for convictions. How could the school administration
not know of such an event?
The Department of Education claims it is trying to teach children to think
cogently. Well, it should start with itself. It should honestly and openly
analyze the problem and present real statistics. Then it should look at the
best way - not necessarily the easiest, if most expensive, way - to solve
the problem. In some selective cases, this might entail fingerprinting but
it would be an approach that treats school employees as individuals, and
with the respect they deserve.
Some 47 individuals representing 821 years of school experience have already
refused to be fingerprinted in an act of courage that should make Maine
citizens proud. It should also shame the bureaucrats. The refusers are the
ones standing up for the integrity of the schools and the quality of the
people who work there.
But if we follow our present course, these 47, who by their actions
represent what we should be teaching all children about a free society, will
be thrown out of the profession they love. It will not be many years before
we look back and wonder how we could have done this horrible thing. Only the
Legislature now stands between us and that sad day.
It deeply saddens me that the people in charge of our educational
establishment do not have the understanding of civil liberties, or the
empathy with good teachers, or the sense of history that would prevent them
from proceeding in such an ignorant manner.
Peter Cox editorial, Maine Times 11/18/99
It's not the $49, it's the principle
So far, attention has focused on the $49 all school personnel must pay to be
fingerprinted to make sure they don't have a criminal past of child
molestation. Unfortunately, this has distracted attention from a much more
important issue: How far we are willing to go in removing the constitutional
prohibition against unwarranted searches and the presumption of innocence?
Yes, it is possible that the fingerprinting could turn up someone with a
criminal record of child abuse who could not have been identified through a
normal background check that should be part of any hiring procedure. I have
heard tales of people who managed to change their Social Security numbers --
but how they were able to change their identities and still keep their
teaching credentials and receive employer recommendations in their old name
is beyond me.
But that fingerprinting might turn up someone more easily than a thorough
background check at the time of hiring is irrelevant. The more we remove the
rights of the accused -- by implication every teacher and school worker
stands suspect if not actually accused -- the easier it is to find the
guilty. That's why we no longer allow the police to beat confessions out of
people; even if that confession is corroborated by other evidence, we do not
allow it.
What constitutes an intrusion so offensive that it attracts public attention
is murky. A federal judge ruled recently that strip searches of traffic
offenders in New Hampshire jails merited compensation for the victims, but
it had been going on for three years before it was stopped. Most of us would
be offended that a woman caught speeding or drinking too much could be told
to take off her pants by a male guard.
Yet this went on even though courts have ruled repeatedly that strip
searches are unconstitutional unless there is good reason to suspect someone
is carrying contraband. Clearly, not everyone found this an offensive
search.
Do we have good reason to believe everyone who works in a school might be a
child abuser? Is it only because they come into contact with children, even
though some come into no more unsupervised contact than would millions of
others who don't work in schools?
Certainly teachers are in much less of a position to commit abuse than are
pediatricians. After we finish fingerprinting educators, why not doctors?
And while we're talking about fingerprinting, how about taking DNA? If we
had everyone's DNA, we would have a really effective way to catch more
criminals.
In the past, this country has rejected the idea of identity cards that have
to be shown to officials on demand. It reeked too much of totalitarian
states, but now we're heading that way.
What makes the fingerprinting of educators particularly offensive is that
many of them have worked and lived in the same community for 15 or more
years, yet they are still suspect. Legal issues aside, do we no longer treat
such people with the human respect they have earned?
I could tolerate fingerprinting new hires, although I think there are
better, if not easier, ways to do background checks. And that's what this is
all about -- fingerprinting is easy. At least by limiting the procedure to
new hires, applicants know beforehand what to expect of their future
profession. The implication that teachers start under a cloud of suspicion
is only one of many existing impediments to attracting the best.
This demeaning attack on teachers is just one more result of our
self-inflicted hysteria about child abuse, the same hysteria that leads to
such idiocies as a parent being arrested because she sent out photographs of
her naked child to be processed.
Fingerprinting will not turn up someone who avoided prosecution by agreeing
to leave the profession. Someone who manages to change their Social Security
number and get recertified is going to find another place to abuse children
if she cannot teach. So this won't even stop future abuse but will only
change where the abuse occurs.
This is one of those laws that slipped through the Legislature without
thorough public debate. By holding up the possibility of the demon child
abuser, the public is understandably unconcerned about what appears to be a
minor infringement of teachers' individual rights. And even most teachers
are not complaining, except for that $49.
But the fact is that when we start to lose our rights to be free from
unwarranted search, we give them up one at a time, incrementally. So if you
think fingerprinting everyone's OK, what's wrong with the government tapping
your phone line or monitoring your e-mail -- if you have nothing to hide?
Peter Cox Editorial Maine Times 12/16/99
Cost just part of the problem with school fingerprinting
Successful debate is always sequential and therefore I am taking the liberty
of continuing the discussion of legislation to fingerprint all Maine school
personnel.
In the wake of the outcry over fingerprinting, some legislators have said
that the issue slipped right by them. The flaws that might have been
revealed in rigorous debate remained hidden until after the fact. That being
so, there is an opportunity to revisit the entire situation, not just who
pays. Previously, I dealt with the privacy issue. Now I would like to look
at it from an entirely practical viewpoint.
Those in the Department of Education who support the universal
fingerprinting do not offer numbers but say convicted sexual offenders are
working in our schools. Are they? If so, they got there due to the
incompetence of administrators who did not do normal background checks. A
possible solution is to review personnel records and recheck those not
properly screened. If there is some suspicion but it is not conclusive,
fingerprint. This cost should be borne by the school district, which should
also hold its administrators responsible for not doing their jobs in the
first place.
Any adequate hiring policy includes a check of references, questioning
previous employers about performance and a search for any criminal
convictions. Criminal records are available and are searched by numerous
Maine employers when assessing new hires. (Fingerprinting can trace a person
who has changed his identity.)
If these simple procedures can take care of the problem, why were they not
instituted before taking such an expensive and intrusive step as universal
fingerprinting? This looks suspiciously like a solution -- a new national
fingerprint file -- in search of a problem.
One of the arguments being made now is that Maine must implement such a law
to protect itself in the future. Other states are cracking down on child
molesters and unless Maine sets up an effective barrier, it could become a
dumping ground for these people.
The logic of that argument is that the danger lies in new hires, not in
long-time employees. But the majority of the cost -- under current state
law -- will be for long-time employees, including those who have already
been screened once. By definition, any school employee who has committed
sexual abuse, and been convicted for it, would have been fired.
The idea of periodically screening all employees defies logic; no one is
going to show up on the second round unless they have committed a crime in
between. And if they have committed a crime in between, surely the school
would not hire them again. (If they go to another school, they become a new
hire, subject to fingerprinting.)
If a child abuser is active and has never been found out before, background
checks will not help. The problem then lies in discovering abuse. How we
protect against abuse deserves attention.
I have an additional worry even with fingerprinting new hires, although the
limitation to new hires would certainly be a vast improvement. It’s this: If
school administrators have been so lax in the past they have not done the
kind of background checks any responsible employer would use, why is it not
likely they would come to rely on fingerprinting and omit the other parts of
the background check? Even if fingerprinting is added, the other parts of
the background check should be carried out. And no rote checklist should
become another way for administrators to escape responsibility for making
sound judgments.
The person most likely to slip through the system is one who has been caught
for child abuse but has cut a deal with a previous employer, agreeing not to
teach again in return for not being prosecuted. Such a person would not show
up through fingerprinting and could only be located by talking with former
employers.
I urge legislators to go back to these basic questions. Such questions
should have been asked before but apparently they were not. There is still a
chance to come up with a much more effective and efficient law. Let’s take
advantage of a second chance to do it.