Published: November 1, 2000

I Am Not A Crook

One day last year, instructor Carl Chase reached into his mailbox at the George Stevens Academy in Blue Hill, Maine, and found a letter from his principal. That's when he first learned the news: Thanks to a new law, employees at Maine public and private schools were to be fingerprinted by state police for a criminal records check. Teachers who did not get printed would not be recertified.

Chase, a 30-year veteran teacher, was immediately offended: "I get paid very little, and my initial reaction was that if this is all they care about, then I am out of here." Despite seven years at Stevens, an independent school where he had created an innovative steel-drum curriculum, he decided not to return to the classroom when...