The last two editions of the American Journal carried stories about an underage drinking party in Gorham, and how the Gorham School Department and Police Department responded to it.
The stories prompted a response from Gorham Superintendent Ted Sharp at a school committee meeting last week, and those comments appear in their entirety on this page. Sharp questioned why the story had gotten attention from the press, defended the school’s response to the situation and defended the school’s refusal to release any details about it as “morally responsible.”
There are many reasons we covered this story. For starters, teenage drinking is an important issue for communities to address – something that can’t happen if no one knows what’s going on or how local authorities are responding.
The Gorham police are taking teen drinking quite seriously. Like many police departments in southern Maine, the department recently received a grant that will allow police to increase enforcement of drinking laws. Gorham police took the underage drinking at a home in Gorham on Feb. 18 seriously enough to investigate and charge two minors and an adult.
The drinking that police investigated took place six days before the Gorham boys hockey team lost to Deering in a preliminary round of the Western Class A hockey tournament. After the game, a grandparent of one of the players, Bob Oliver, questioned why players who had been involved in the drinking hadn’t been suspended from the game.
Oliver raised these questions in a letter to Gorham High School Principal John Drisko and he raised them in an interview with an American Journal reporter. Oliver spoke out publicly, risking harassment, because he felt the way the school was responding to underage drinking was important.
School department officials have refused to release any details about the incident, saying they don’t release information about students to protect them because they are minors. The school has policies, they said, and they followed them.
However, the reporter covering the story never asked for the names of any of the students involved because we never had any intention of publishing them, in keeping with the policy of this newspaper.
Many newspapers do publish the names of players when they are suspended from athletic competitions. They do that because newspapers publish the names of minors when they do good things all the time – when they achieve great things on the playing field or in other extra-curricular competitions. What message does it send to simply ignore it when students get in trouble and suspended from those activities?
Minors in our communities get an elevated level of protection – from parents, schools, police and newspapers – because they are still too young to face adult consequences for their actions. That’s a good thing.
But we can’t allow the desire to protect them to keep us from honestly addressing the problems that pose the greatest threat to them – things like alcohol and drug abuse, suicide and depression, and violence. If we refuse to talk about these problems openly and honestly, we as a community, and as a newspaper, do a disservice to them.
Brendan Moran, editor
Send questions/comments to the editors.
