I Refuse - the fingerprinting of Maine school teachers brings protest

Progressive, The, August, 2000 by Bernie Huebner

Roger is a friend as well as my doctor, and he has seen me through crises before. He asked me a checklist of questions that quickly ruled out the two things I thought might be wrong: microbial illness or rolling depression. And then, from his experience as a gerontologist, he offered the following interpretation of my hapless condition: "You're not depressed," he said. "You're suffering from a major loss. Your symptoms are exactly the same as those experienced by my older patients who have just lost a spouse."

What a demonstration of the mind-body connection, I thought, that the loss of a mere idea, an abstraction like "freedom from unreasonable suspicion," should produce such a cascade of physical symptoms! Weeks later, the symptoms have lessened but dependably still ruin part of almost every day.

In June, both the Maine Civil Liberties Union and a high-powered Bangor law firm we had been talking to rendered the same opinion of our request to challenge the constitutionality of the law in court. It would be futile, they said. The judge would not look at the merits of our particular case, at the data we had researched showing that the law will have virtually no impact on child abuse, that the nearly nonexistent possible gain from the law is overwhelmed by millions of dollars in expenses, the destruction of numerous careers, the loss of many of Maine's finest teachers, the sowing of massive distrust of teachers in the public's mind, a false sense of security about preventing child abuse, and on and on.

What would they look at then? we asked. At precedent, came the answer. In effect, a judge who is asked to weigh the constitutionality of a law looks only at what other judges have said before. Precedent is everything, and we have no precedent on our side. Yet the specific constitutionality of mass fingerprinting of teachers as a strategy to prevent child abuse has never even been argued in court. Any judicial precedent is therefore merely tangential at best, we thought. But we did not prevail.

And so right now we are in full retreat. Some of us have already resigned; others, including me, wait on a kind of Recertification Death Row. The English teachers among us mention Catch-22 and Brave New World. The math teachers wonder why they have been teaching data-collection and creative problem-solving all these years. The history teachers recall ruefully that the U.S. Constitution is one of the great settings of precedent of all time. And Suzanne, as she tried to do in front of the Education Committee only to be gaveled into silence, points to the state's vaunted curriculum goals. In the section for Middle School Social Studies, these call for students to learn how to articulate and defend the constitutional principle of individual liberties.

Elementary teacher that I am, my private hell is now the classroom, where I often no longer believe there is any enduring purpose to my teaching. What is the point, I keep asking myself, in teaching little children to think clearly--to gather valid information, to consider alternative viewpoints, to search for solutions that treat people with respect--when all around us the adults remain apathetic about these ultimate tools of civilization?