More than 65 children were fingerprinted and photographed at the event in Hillsboro, N.H., which was jointly sponsored by the Keene Police Officers’ Association (KPOA) and the Hillsboro-Deering Support Staff. Officers from the Hillsboro Police Department also joined in.

“The information on this document is everything a parent would need to file a report with the police department if the child went missing,” says KPOA president John Stewart, noting that distraught parents commonly can’t remember their child’s eye or hair color when the child disappears.

KPOA purchased the fingerprinting software program with donations solicited from businesses in the community.

It is just one of KPOA’s latest community endeavors—and one that it can share with other AFT locals in New England.

“Having up-to-date information on your child will enable law enforcement agencies to electronically disseminate essential missing child information, statewide if necessary, within minutes and will dramatically increase the possibility of bringing a missing child home unharmed,” says Kelly D’Errico, president of the Hillsboro-Deering Support Staff.

“As long as it’s a day’s drive,” Stewart says, KPOA will share its fingerprinting program with other AFT locals that want to host their own event.

“It’s a nice way to get everybody to work together,” says Stewart, who wants the union to be synonymous with community service.

KPOA is currently the only law enforcement organization in New Hampshire to utilize the SentryKIDS® FingerTIPS™ digital fingerprinting software.

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan dealt the latest blow to the administration’s attempts to gut collective bargaining and due process in the name of national security when he blocked implementation of labor relations regulations in the Defense Department’s so-called National Security Personnel System (NSPS). The new system covers more than 350,000 civilian Defense Department employees, including nearly 1,000 teachers on military bases worldwide who are represented by the AFT’s Overseas Federation of Teachers.

“The administration’s claim that a new personnel system is needed to fight the war on terror was a hollow pretense for denying workers the right to due process and collective bargaining,” AFT president Edward J. McElroy said in a statement.

Sullivan’s decision, handed down in February, follows District Judge Rosemary Collyer’s August decision, which effectively halted implementation of the Homeland Security Department’s personnel system overhaul. Both Sullivan and Collyer said the labor relations regulations in each department’s new systems was illegal.

The labor relations regulations of both systems were symmetrical. Each allowed high-level officials to void collective bargaining agreements at any time, each permitted the departments to unilaterally take matters off the bargaining table, and each established their own labor relations boards and appeals processes.

Echoing Collyer’s legal opinion of the DHS system, Sullivan wrote that collective bargaining under the NSPS was “illusory” because it provides the department secretary with “numerous avenues” to “declare contract terms null and void, without prior notice to the unions or employees without bargaining or recourse.”

The Defense Department has “eviscerated collective bargaining rights with regulations nearly identical to those invalidated [by Collyer], despite virtually indentical requirements by Congress that each human resources management system ensure collective bargaining,” Sullivan wrote.

More than three dozen unions, including unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO and independent unions, have banded together to fight the new personnel systems.

Despite two strikes against it, however, the administration is expected to pursue broader federal civil service reforms—after the November 2006 elections. The White House’s draft proposal, so-called Working for America Act, was released in July.