I Refuse - the fingerprinting of Maine school teachers brings protest

Progressive, The, August, 2000 by Bernie Huebner

Still, my own realization that I had to refuse took time to incubate. My uncertainty caused me faint embarrassment sometimes in Suzanne's and several other refusers' bold presence. Under Maine's five-year recertification cycle, they were facing dismissal as early as July 1. I was not up until 2003, which lent me more time to weigh my options.

But it all came perfectly clear one afternoon after school as I was driving to a work session of the Education Committee in Augusta. Once again, I was running through the scenario of fingerprinting in my imagination: walking up to the state troopers, who were coming right into the schools to "process"--oh, that word!--us, submitting the required identification and the filled-out processing form, stepping before the armed trooper with the ink pad and the fingerprint cards ... and then suddenly I felt physically sick. It was, I recognized with a chill, the same feeling of guilt one has after lying to or betraying somebody. Except the person I was betraying was myself.

For some, the decision whether or not to refuse to submit has become a nightmare. Ann McHugh, who gave up a college position to come teach history at the Maine School for Science and Mathematics, struggles daily with the unthinkable position the state has put her in.

"I, too, am trying to imagine actually being fingerprinted," she says, "and I, too, am having trouble with that last step. It is all so ominous, and so few people understand. I don't know whether I can do it. Is this 1930-something? Am I to report with my identity card and be registered? People are so apathetic to what this fingerprinting, urine testing, et cetera, really means.... Yet I have responsibilities to others beside myself. Can I chuck aside my home and leave us virtually nothing for retirement? This is a heartbreak. And how can I keep teaching my students that `democracy only works if you participate,' when I've just been shown that it often doesn't work even then? This is not the Maine I remember from twenty-five years ago. But then, this isn't the nation I remember from then, either."

The emotional fallout from Governor King's veto has been overwhelming for many of us. Maybe we are naive idealists; it takes something like that to endure as a public school teacher, anyway. But now we've been at the very center of a whirlwind that impacts people's lives with severity and injustice, and we've seen up close how flawed the system is. We've watched as the chief of the Maine State Police and the chairperson of the Education Committee supplied the Maine House of Representatives with blatantly misleading information, and we've noticed how our elected officials shrugged off the deception when we pointed it out to them.

Thursday, one sleepless night after the veto, I came home sick from school at 10 a.m. The next day I made it to 11:30. By Saturday, I had persistent stomach cramps and felt so dizzy I occasionally lost my balance simply trying to walk. Monday, after a day at school spent struggling to find some reason, any reason, to teach, I stopped by my doctor's office. Maybe he could give me something to help me sleep, I thought, or anti-depressants.