Short Spoken Public Hearing Testimony Boothbay's Repealed and Replaced School Charter

Testimony submitted to be spoken places the charter within the framework of home rule vs state central management of everything

Photo by Alexander Jawfox on Unsplash

I have received information about a public hearing scheduled for the Boothbay School Charter No. 1786 H.P. 1149 this coming Tuesday May 9 2003

My previous post was the long-written version of mt testimony. Since the charter says it will be governed by state law, it was indeed state law that had to be discussed.

I felt that was too long for a spoken testimony and so I also submitted this testimony to be spoken in the Zoom Meeting on Mau 9 at 1:00 pm.

My name is Susan Mackenzie Andersen. I am a member of the Boothbay Community School District where I attended school through grade 12, graduating in 1966. My parents moved to the region in 1952 to establish a small free enterprise business, Andersen Design, that designed and made ceramics and taught those skills on the job to the women who used to work in the fish packing industry. The original school charter, which is now being repealed and replaced, was created in 1953.

I am also an independent researcher, and have studied the Maine economic development policy put into place in 1976, I have been narrating the story of Maine’s incremental transition from a Home Rule State in 1969 to a centrally managed corporate state in 2023. I publish the Substack Newsletter, The Individual vs the Empire.

I have submitted a much longer testimony that goes into greater depth about the state laws that this local charter is simply accepting, not just the current state laws but any new state laws enacted in the future. The fact that it is said in so many words that our local school educational charter is governed by state law is to relinquish our home rule authority completely, which even state law, including Title 20 Chapter 105, states that when there is a conflict between private and special law and state law that private and special law takes priority.

And yet this school charter is written such that it can be interpreted as private and special law is relinquishing its rights and granting all superior authority to state law. The statements that say that the District School Charter is governed by state law need to be struck out. We do not know how the courts would interpret that.

There is also the issue that the inhabitants of the community had no say in approving the school charter as it went straight from the school district committee to submitting it to the legislature. The constitutional Home Rule Amendment says the “inhabitants of any municipality shall have the power to alter and amend their charters on all matters, not prohibited by Constitution or general law, which are local and municipal in character.” and I submit that “inhabitants of the community” is a significant choice of words.

Without going into full detail about what is objectional in state law, I will simply point out that state law permits our educational system to be funded by conditional gifts, which, I submit it legalized play to play and open to all kinds of corruption, particularly corruption of our home rule authority and in this case, it does not even defer to state law but goes straight to the will of private parties.

Finally, Sec. 2. Governance transition. is very peculiar. Never was there a better example of intent to say what it means in between the lines, specifically in-between the header “Governance transition” and the next statement that “The district school committee members and the trustees of the community school district serving as of the effective date of this Act shall continue in their offices for their respective remaining terms.”

Isn’t there a paragraph missing between those lines such as explaining why government transition is even in the school charter other than to describe a process of how that is done which the section does not provide. The void in-between the lines begs to be filled in with what is happening simultaneously to the repealing and replacing of our local school charter and that is the massive new school system that is being pushed on this district and proposed to be funded by conditional gifts, allowing the inhabitants of the municipality to be replaced with private special interests, and begging the question “Is changing the people running our schools one of the donor conditions, which leads to the next question “Why?” and that is a whole other can of worms.