FOAA Request Reveals That Conditional Gifts Are Authorized in Funding the Innovation of the Boothbay Peninsula Public School System
Despite all denials- It's in the record that donations for public education can be conditional!
A short while ago I sent an FOAA request to Boothbay School Superintendent Robert Kahler requesting the identity of the anonymous donors that financed the architects to design the school.
This is the answer that I received: from Superintendent Khaler:
I am writing to follow up with you regarding your FOAA request dated 17 January 2023. In response to your request, the District will not be producing records that are designated confidential by statute (1 M.R.S.A. 402(3)(a)) or records which are otherwise privileged or confidential (including communications that are protected by the attorney-client privilege or work product doctrines). I am attaching with this email the public records otherwise responsive to your request, which will complete the Districts response to your request.
Sincerely, Robert M. Kahler, Superintendent of Schools, AOS 98
Mr. Kahler opens with what the District will not produce, rather than what they are producing, setting the tone of the communication.
Claiming attorney-client privilege or work product doctrines is like taking the fifth. It invites suspicion and speculation in the court of public opinion. which is the court we are in. In that court, I am the arguing litigant for my client, the pre-existing history and culture that is subject to being repealed and replaced by donors bearing conditional gifts. The voters are the jury.
This is my request :
This is a Freedom Of Access Request for documents identifying the donors who financed architects Lavallee Brensinger to design the Boothbay Regional School system, plus the channel through which the payment was received, including the donor and the recipient of the donation and if this donation was made as Municipal section 9 Fiscal Matters conditional gifts, please provide documentary evidence of the conditions.
If you are not the party through whom this information is available, please identify the correct party to contact with their contact information.
If you are the correct party and you feel there is a legal reason why you can not fulfill this FOOA request, please identify that legal reason.
1 M.R.S.A. 402 is the Freedom Of Access Statute. (3)states what public records are and the lettered subsections are the exceptions to a record being publicly accessible.
1 M.R.S.A. 402 A. Records that have been designated confidential by statute; [PL 1975, c. 758 (NEW).]
Mr. Kahler’s written explanation tells only that they will not produce what I have asked for that has been deemed confidential by statute, which is different than a condition made by a donor, which is authorized by omission in Municipal section 9 Fiscal Matters conditional gifts to be conditions of confidentiality, whereas other statutes state that specific types of information are confidential and why. In the case of §5654. Conditional gifts, it is the donor asserting confidentiality because the statute places no limitations on what terms the donor can make, allowing donors to innovate their own terms.
In that statement, Mr. Kahler provides more information than I requested. He tells us that confidentiality in school negotiations is protected by State law. There are many statutes in Maine that deem confidentiality, for example, under Title 9-B: FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS there is §226. Confidentiality and there is Title 5, Chapter 383: ECONOMIC AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT 28 §13119-A. Records confidential, Confidentiality often has to do with the State’s partnership with private corporations and in those negotiations, the state is the negotiating agent rather than the municipality acting as the negotiating agent. So it’s none of the public business when the state and private industry merge as set forth for educational institutions in The Industrial Partnerships Act of 2013 under Title 26: LABOR AND INDUSTRY.
Title 26includes §3. Confidentiality of records
§3304. Industry partnerships
1. Objectives. The objectives of an industry partnership are to:
D. Help educational and training institutions align curricula and programs to industry demand, particularly for high-skill occupations; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
E. Foster and strengthen relationships between and among education programs working to address the needs of related industry sectors; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
F. Facilitate relationships, remove barriers and leverage and align resources between participating departments and agencies of State Government and employers working to address the needs of related industry sectors; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
G. Inform and collaborate with the career and technical education centers, the boards of the local workforce investment areas designated pursuant to the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, Public Law 113-128, youth councils, business-education partnerships, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions, parents and career counselors for the purpose of addressing the challenges of connecting disadvantaged adults and youth to careers; [PL 2017, c. 110, §31 (AMD).]
H. Help companies identify and collaborate to address common organizational and human resource challenges, including, but not limited to, recruiting new workers, retraining dislocated workers, hiring foreign-trained professionals, retaining incumbent workers, implementing a high-performance work organization, adopting new technologies and fostering experiential and contextualized on-the-job learning; [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).]
K. Strengthen connections among businesses in industry clusters, leading to cooperation beyond workforce issues that would improve competitiveness and job quality, such as joint purchasing, market research or centers for technology and innovation. [PL 2013, c. 368, Pt. FFFFF, §1 (NEW).] (emphasis by author)
Perhaps Mr. Kahler did not want to reveal if the donors were asserting non-disclosure agreements and so he deferred to state statutes as the reason why information cannot be disclosed opening a whole other can of worms. Enter conflicts of interest with the Home Rule Amendment.
Mr. Kaher acknowledges that he is not providing complete documentation as he provides documentation that mentions that funding includes Section 1705 of Title 20-A which stipulates the authority to accept conditional gifts which are defined in a multitude of statutes for a multitude of reasons and in a multitude of ways.
It is easy to jump to the assumption that Mr. Kahler’s words refer to the definition of Title 30-A, governing regions and municipalities §5654. Conditional gifts, where we find that there are no limits imposed by the Maine statutes on what conditions the donor may impose allowing the donor to assert nondisclosure agreements.
In §5654. Conditional gifts, There is only one condition and it is imposed on the municipality:
2. Perpetually comply with conditions. When the donor or the donor's representative has completed the donor's part of the agreement concerning the execution of a conditional gift, the municipality shall perpetually comply with, and may raise money to carry into effect, the conditions upon which the agreement was made. [PL 1987, c. 737, Pt. A, §2 (NE
But since Mr. Kahler avoided my direct question about whether Municipal section 9 Fiscal Matters conditional gifts were being used and instead referred to a statute Title 20-A Education authorizing the authority to accept conditional gifts, we do not know if §5654. Conditional gifts govern the negotiations and whether Part 2. Perpetually comply with conditions, applies. This is important for the public to know and can possibly qualify as an exception to attorney work product privilege
Attorney work product privilege permits attorneys to withhold from production documents and other tangible things prepared in anticipation of litigation by or for another party or its representative. See: Fed. R. Civ. P. § 26(b)(3). As with attorney-client privilege, work product privilege does not protect underlying facts.
However, work product privilege may be overcome if there is a substantial need for materials to prepare the case and the opposing party cannot reasonably obtain their substantial equivalent by other means. For instance, if there is no contemporaneous record and no witnesses to interview, the court may not provide work product privilege.
Surely the right to know what the terms of the agreement are that a municipality is required to honor in perpetuity qualifies as a substantial need to prepare a case if it ever comes to litigation, which is what Mr. Kahler conjures up by appealing to the attorney-client privilege or work product doctrines, as such terminology applies to preparations in anticipation of litigation
attorney work product privilege
Attorney work product privilege permits attorneys to withhold from production documents and other tangible things prepared in anticipation of litigation by or for another party or its representative. See: Fed. R. Civ. P. § 26(b)(3). As with attorney-client privilege, work product privilege does not protect underlying facts.
Since Mr. Kahler deferred to Title 20 governing education rather than Title 30 governing regions and municipalities, we must take his comments in the context of LD 1845 an Act To Amend the Maine Education Statutes which repeals the word “restructure” and replaces it with “innovate”. The word “cooperate” is also replaced with “partner”, meaning that public and private schools of higher education will partner with public secondary schools to implement innovation and professional goals from the developed level of education to the earliest years, which we can see is provided for in The Industrial Partnerships Act.
At the top of the state educational hierarchy is the University of Maine. which is a clear model for the “research and demonstration schools” wherein, pursuant to LD 1845 the rules that govern general public education can be waived to accommodate innovation and anything goes. We are not in Kansas anymore. Education can be anything that the boards and their funding partners negotiate it to be.
2. Waiver of rules for local schools. A school administrative unit undergoing schoolrestructuring innovation may request that the commissioner waive the application of
specific rules to that unit, or to certain schools in that unit, if such action the waiver is necessary to achieve school restructuring the proposed innovation LD 1845
Given the unprecedented freedom granted to demonstration schools, to change the rules, it is all the more important to know and trust those who are breaking the old rules and making the new ones.
The School Board responds to my FOAA request with legal terms used by legal litigants and so the question becomes who represents the municipalities that, pursuant to §5654. Conditional gifts, are required to honor the donor’s terms of the agreement in perpetuity.
Normally that entity would be the Town administration and selectmen but in this case, the Town Selectmen are colluding with the School Board in repealing and replacing the school charter and the secrecy surrounding it, This is the first time charter documents are being repealed and replaced innovated, going back to 1953 but the boards are not telling the public what is in the newly innovated school charter. When the subject of discussion is the school charter, the boards talk instead about the budget. The school charter is on a need-to-know basis and all the public needs to know is that they are required to pay for its budget.
However in the document provided by my FOAA request, BOOTHBAY-BOOTHBAY HARBOR CSD JOINT MEETING OF THE CSD BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND THE CSD BOARD OF TRUSTEES MINUTES 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, August 25, 2021under DISCUSSION:
Troy Lewis asked if covers the provisions of the Charter- Superintendent responded that it did.
But now that same charter is being repealed and replaced, as the local boards are innovating the transformation of our public education system, as reflected in the change of the original costs of 10-16 million transformed into 100 million in the course of six months.
I have observed from studying public-private relationships for a long time, that the public does not have anyone representing their interests. The public serves either as financing pawns in negotiations or as instruments of the public-private corporations, which is the meaning of using the term, “workforce”, rather than working class or working people. The working class is people of many different occupations. The workforce is what the corporate world needs to activate its ends. The “workforce” are the pawns traded in public-private negotiations for subsidies for large corporations in the state’s “targeted sector”. The essential workers are the workers needed by a community to perform essential tasks that the community needs.
I am working on new developments in a story I wrote about a few years ago regarding the dispute between KDRA corporation and the Town of Rome, and so I am reading the special act of legislation enacted to charter a large region of Maine municipalities into a development corporation. I am wondering as I am reading the charter written by the Maine Legislature, what’s in it for the municipalities? The charter reads like a corporation establishing its own rights and source of funding, (the municipalities), evoking one-sided agreements written by online platforms.
The Boothbay Region is a small community on a peninsula. We can do better than that! We can be a different type of culture than the megalopolis! In the larger picture, why should a “demonstration school” be located on an isolated peninsula rather than centrally located in many regions? other than the will of a private donor’s cabal?
Four City-States Chartered During the King and Baldacci Governorships
Maine has four city-state corporations that I know of. One is the Kennebec Regional Development Authority and the other three are former navy bases repurposed for civilian use, but not by the political ideology that founded the United States and Maine. It is tragically ironic that bases that were used to defend the nation against advancing totalitarianism have been transformed into the instruments for creeping totalitarianism. (quote from this post)
Shifting focus, I discovered something curious that may explain why I am currently being recruited by many newsletter platforms. I was setting my newsletter up on an advertiser platform called Paved, thinking Why not? I have nothing to lose but not expecting much since my subscriber list is a micro-particle within the sea of social media.
As I was working on the application I noticed I have an auto-generated rating for Domain Authority of 85. I had no idea what “Domain Authority” means so I looked it up
Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed….that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.
….. The actual Domain Authority calculation itself uses a machine learning model to predictively find a "best fit" algorithm that most closely correlates our link data with rankings across thousands of actual search results that we use as standards to scale against. source
Above 60 is considered an excellent score. source. DA can fluctuate related to what is happening around it, for example, when a large platform experiences substantial link growth it skews the scaling process for everyone else.
I checked on another rating site ahrefs where my DA is even higher at 91. Then I checked Wikipedia’s DA on ahrefs and it too is 91, What is going on?
Maybe it is because I write about obscure history so I will be at the top of a search for obscure history, such as the fact that in Maine, the centrally managed economy was deemed into existence under Governor Longley in 1976, which the Maine admin at Wikipedia would not allow to be included in Governor Longley’s bio declaring that records from the Maine Legislative Library are not acceptable references!.
On the other hand, not everything I write about is obscure. Only the algorithm knows why! Finally, I have found something great about AI, It grants me recognition that human authorities will not! Here is my profile on Paved- suggested for book advertising.
I read a short article about how to increase your DA rating- my secret is to not do anything. It seems to be working!
Ok- enough about that!
The information delivered per my FOAA request documents includes a list of the donors who paid the architects. There is actually nothing to identify what the list of names represents, but it is a reasonable assumption that it is the names I asked for. I am going to process the names into a spreadsheet and eventually incorporate it into my Ersi data compilation project. More on that in another post. I will call them the Community Members Group in the database since that is how they identify themselves but now we know who they are. Previously we were told only that they wanted to remain anonymous. The question is why they wanted to remain anonymous
We do not know how the project was presented to the donors at the time the funds for the architects were raised. It was initially estimated at a cost between 10-16 million and had not yet been innovated into a corporate industrial training center (reasoned speculation on my part), which has brought its cost up to 100 million.
The minutes describe the architect funding project as
“Project work to the extent necessary to develop the Project concept design and concept design cost estimate sufficiently to be able to submit the Project to referendum vote, provided, however, that the cost of this contract shall at no time exceed the availability of donated funds. (emphasis is in the minutes)
D. Public Comment: Tom Perkins would prefer if the motions stayed as unconditional gifts, which was the intent from the beginning.
Despite Mr, Perkins's public comment the board’s motion included section 1705 of Title 20-A, which is the authority to use conditional gifts.
Pine Tree Zones and Opportunity Zones are area-specific while the industrialization of the public school system allows the state to tax-payer subsidize large private corporations across the entire state of Maine, in every region and municipality.
Paul Coulombe has been a leader in pushing for updating the school. His initial donations were made for (STEAM) equipment through the Boothbay Region Education Foundation as reported in the Boothbay Register on 01/12/2021, He started talking about a new building back then.
Mr. Coulombe is on a mission to replace all old buildings on the peninsula with buildings in his style which is not bad and not exceptional, just generally all the same. The descriptor “new construction” describes Mr, Coulombe’s style.
The minutes of the school board and trustees dated August 25, 2021 included in the Attached Documents in Mr. Kahler’s response replace the words " grade Pre K through 12 school consolidated school construction" with the words "The Project". There is no explanation for why this was done. My guess is the planning cabal does not want to have their innovation limited by confining it to education grade Pre K through 12 school consolidated school construction, There is so much more that innovators can do with public education systems such as turning old outdated school systems into high tech job training centers for the state’s industrial armies.
The newly innovated educational statute replaces “cooperate” with “partner” with the department, the state board, and school administrative units to provide appropriate and timely professional development programs and other support services to educators employed in public schools. They have to be retrained to the specs of the innovators.
The public and private postsecondary institutions of higher education in the State are urged to cooperate partner with the department, the state board and school administrative units to provide appropriate and timely professional development
programs and other support services to educators employed in public schools engaged in school restructuring innovation efforts.
It is highly probable that Incorporating higher education into secondary schools will also mean instituting across the educational spectrum, the University of Maine’s policy on patents and intellectual property rights which claims authorship rights based on ownership of the facilities, Young minds are so open and trusting, it’s easier to harvest their ideas for the enterprise whereas older students might be more aware of the socio-political agenda and hold back.
I think there is one word that the Maine Legislature forgot to repeal and replace:
Education Indoctrination