TWO SETS OF RIGHTS?

Proponents of fingerprinting of school personnel offer nothing but anecdotes in support of their position. Anecdotes, including those of the Commissioner of Education and READERS DIGEST, while heart-rending, are of no use in determining public policy.

Numbers are hard to come by in this matter, but enough are available to allow us to set an upper limit on the credibility of these anecdotes. Nationally, the percentage of child abuse that takes place in the schools is so small that it is not even given its own category. Instead, it is thrown into the 'other' category, itself totaling less than two percent of overall cases. Let us say that half of this two percent takes place in the schools. I doubt it is even close to that, but we can go ahead and use the number -- 1% -- for the sake of argument.

Of these, most are previously unconvicted, a fact admitted even by Commissioner Albanese in his Bangor Daily News article of February 9. Those without prior convictions would not be detected by fingerprinting. The highest estimate I have heard of abuse by people who would be caught is about 10%. That is the highest. So putting these figures together, the fingerprinting law might prevent as much as one tenth of one percent of abuse cases. That's one in a thousand.

So we are going to spend $3 million in the first five years and about $300,000 per year thereafter to prevent one abuse in a thousand? In Maine in 1997 there were well over three thousand substantiated abuse cases and an almost equal number DHS didn't have funds or staff even to investigate. What could DHS do with all the money we are planning to spend on fingerprinting? The schools themselves could use it for training in recognition of danger signs, in teaching kids to protect themselves. Crisis intervention centers could do wonderful work with this money. Certainly, we could prevent many times that one case in a thousand if we were to spend our money more wisely.

And this brings us to the futility of anecdotal evidence. We hear about cases of abuse in schools because they are so unusual. We don't hear nearly as much about abuse in the home, which is the most likely place for it. Most of the anecdotes we hear are irrelevant to the issue of fingerprinting also because they involve those without criminal records. Suppose we collect anecdotes from outside school and correctly label the ones from inside that would not be affected by fingerprinting. Go back to the 1 in 1,000 figure. We could collect 1,000 horror stories for every one offered by the Commissioner or READERS DIGEST. We should label these horror stories, "Cases we choose to ignore so that we can spend our money on feel-good legislation -- for appearances."

No, the schools are not where the problem lies. They may be the safest places children can be. It is deceptive, futile, and counterproductive to throw resources into that arena. It just alienates the people who are the most common sources of REPORTS of abuse -- school personnel. They are the children's first line of defense, not the enemy.

An informal poll by Maine Educators Against Fingerprinting of a few school systems across the state turned up about 70 people out of a thousand respondents who will refuse to be fingerprinted. Of these, 42 signed an ad to appear in the Maine Sunday Telegram stating that they will give up their jobs rather than comply with this invasion of their privacy. These 42 represent over 700 years of total service. It is our best we will lose, not our worst. The education - - and protection -- of our children cannot help but suffer.

The effects of the fingerprinting law can be summarized simply. On the negative side, we are throwing a substantial amount of somebody's money at a non-problem. We are eroding further our rights to privacy, and we are alienating the very people doing the best job of all in protecting our children. On the positive side? Well, we're protecting one out of a thousand, although we could do even that a lot better if we used our heads. Supporters of the law are fond of saying that we must balance teacher rights against those of children. Nonsense! We are balancing the rights of the thousand children we are ignoring against those of the one we are protecting.

I used to teach classes in research methods at North Carolina State University. The undergraduate class consisted primarily of learning to evaluate evidence. If the Governor and the Commissioner of Education had presented their conclusions to me as a class project, they would have gotten a 'D' -- or been asked to redo the work.