Truth and Consequences
How a massive cultural transformation being marketed by public-private special interests on the Boothbay Peninsula of Maine does not withstand the most elementary, rudimentary research effort.
I was composing a post for two days, working on it yesterday morning when it suddenly disappeared from my dashboard and from Google history. All edits for the post I have been working on since two days before yesterday have been wiped, while other history remains.
I tried to find ways to restore the history but nothing worked and so now I must re-create the post from memory. Here goes: I know it will be a very different post this time around not unaffected by the disappearance of my original post about the proposed 100-million-dollar school. In the vanished post I was more low-key and actually trying to move away from thinking about the depressing transformations being planned for our rural community by outside agitators, but once my post was disappeared low key was out the door and I can’t hold back.
There is a video online at AOS98, the school district website, Building Project Overview in which School Superintendent Robert Kahler is pitching the 80 million dollar school before it became a 100 million dollar school.
Kahler explains that in the beginning there were two unidentified companies that both estimated the cost of the school at 40 million dollars but a May 2022 Boothbay Register article states that two identified architectural firms said “You can expect that the final number is going to land somewhere between the $10.8 million and $16.7 million.”
The misrepresentation of the facts is so easy to establish that it begs the question, what is the perceived character of the public to whom the video is pitching? I submit that the special interests behind this transformation so intentionally exclude community participation that they are woefully occluded from knowing who their audience is.
Mr. Kahler says “Our goal is to complement not to compete” with the “very unique existing services and resources of this region”. In practice, it will likely be “dominate and replace” considering the 100 million dollar school in the context of the BRDC masterplan that includes corporate-owned densely packed homes where the trained workforces will be housed, and the corporations that will move here for the promise of workforce housing and tax-payer funded job training at the public school. The State and its private partners are out to radically transform the community character of a unique rural community into another mile of everywhere, as is the plan for the entire State in LD 2003. Welcome to Dystopia, sold to you as Utopia, for those of you who watched the series, The Walking Dead, you know the story, a common story told throughout history.
As for ”complement but not compete”, that would begin by identifying what the complement of this twenty-first century feudalistic culture is, to which I submit it would be the twenty-first-century cottage industry culture- or businesses in a home which remains off the conversational economic development map, as a culture that allows the innovators, creators, designers, and makers to own their own facilities in which their own innovative projects can be developed free from the threat of having their intellectual property taken by outside facility owners. It’s about an alternative to the ownership class-working class cultural divide, the gift brought to us by the long evolution of the centrally managed economy established by legislative decree in Maine in 1976.
LD1845 An Act To Amend the Education Statutes is an Amendment of Maine’s educational statutes passed last April, a month before Paul Coulombe organized anonymous community members to privately finance architects to design a new school system for the peninsula.
In LD 1845 the public schools are to be transformed into research and development institutions partnering with the State, which in turn partners with private industry.
Considering that research is the newly established purpose of our public educational institutions, Mr. Kahler’s presentation with its lack of, or misrepresenting of facts that are easily researched is inconsistent with the States new purpose of public schools, but it is consistent with the practice that when the State uses words such as “innovation” and “research”, it is intended in the narrowest of terms as applied to the State’s targeted industries, not in researching the facts or lack thereof that the State uses in its marketing its agenda to a public presumed to be easily convinced.
The video displays different parts of the school system that are in disrepair or are in need of replacement with a special focus on the need to replace asbestos. but none of the needed repairs account for estimated costs of 40 million dollars, the purported starting price estimate for the project that grows without limit., as is the meaning of the words in the statute “continuous improvement processes to identify opportunities to innovate school structures and policies”.
In Hiram Maine, a company producing organic granola took over an old elementary school. It cost $814.653 to clean up the asbestos which was funded by grants.
To explain the cost bumped up from 40 to 80 million, according to the video, Mr. Kahler says in a general sort of way that our school needs to be updated to the modern age of technology in which innovation is the number one mover of industry. Actually, I said that last part, but it’s all in the new State educational statutes.
Then the video shows many mockups of the new school as glamorous as a corporate headquarters and tells us that there will also be adult education so that, as I have long suspected, the school can serve as an industrial training center for the workforce of all ages, from secondary school to retirement.
Unlike the densely packed units that the Boothbay Regional Development Corporation is planning to house the workforce, the training facilities are large and spacious with extravagant lobby space to walk around and high ceilings allowing the sunlight to stream into the facilities. Such a community design will encourage the workforce to use the well-lit spacious facilities owned by the public school or private corporations, that the BRDC hopes to attract with tax-payer-funded training facilities and workforce housing.
LD1845 An Act To Amend the Education Statutes was enacted in April 2022.
(struck-out parts are the repealed parts, words in italic are newly added)
§8.
Restructuring public schoolsPublic school innovationTheIn order to support a culture of research and development and elevate the
professionalism of the State's education practitioners, the commissioner shall encourage school administrative unitsto pursue an ongoing process of school restructuringcontinuous improvement processes to identify opportunities to innovate school structures and policies as a means of more effectively meeting the learning needs and improving the academic performance of all students. The public and private postsecondary institutions of higher education in the State are urged tocooperatepartner 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 schoolrestructuringinnovation efforts
What is the difference between restructuring and innovation? Restructuring respects the past. Innovation is anything goes. Read continuous improvement processes to identify opportunities to innovate school structures and policies as in other words continual negotiations with corporate donors will be a matter of course and school administrators can “innovate” in adaptation to conditional gifts with terms of agreement the public may not know but is mandated to honor in perpetuity. In other words, businesses can use our public schools to train their workforce as negotiated in funding deals, as an ongoing practice. Do we even know the parties doing the negotiating and if they should be trusted to go up against well-worn corporate negotiators, striking deals that according to conditional gifts can never be reversed?
Mr. Kahler tells us in very general terms that we need to update our school system for contemporary times.
He knows that eighty million dollars is a lot of money but they plan to cover half of it in private and corporate donations, which Mr. Kahler states as an accepted practice when public education is being repurposed as industrial job training by legislative acts such as Industrial Partnerships and LD1845 An Act To Amend the Education Statutes, but it amounts to tax-payer funded job training and job promotion for the State’s targeted sector, now moving into our public school system, and is unfair to every other industry in the region that has to provide their own worker training and to subsidize the States targeted sector training at an exorbitant cost in luxury facilities. Whom are you kidding?
Kahler says they are talking with private and corporate donors and have begun very preliminary conversations with the region’s “technical education center” about being a satellite center, consistent to form, not identifying that center by name but it could be this state program.
Laws & Funding
Career and technical education (CTE) is governed by State and federal laws and State rules. The federal compliance office is the Office of Vocational and Adult Education. The State Board of Education is the state governing board. Maine Department of Education
Vocational Schools are a good thing but not a replacement for a general public education that holistically prepares the student so that he or she has an informed background for making their own choices about the career the student wants to pursue, as opposed to this:
A. The development of comprehensive educational goals establishing community
expectations for what all students should know, the skills they should possess, the
attitude toward work and learning they should hold upon completing school and the
role of the school in the community; LD1845 An Act To Amend the Education Statutes
The corporate state wants to implement training the students for its industrial armies at the earliest possible age before they have a chance to think differently and innovatively about their own purpose in life.
Mr. Kahler says in the video that they are negotiating already with private and corporate donors, even before the event of a public referendum over whether or not the community wants to go down this path. His hopes are high. A lot has been invested in the dream of unending corporate growth as an industrial school serving industrial interests. It feels so much more important than being the superintendent of a traditional American public school.
About a month after the video is published the estimated cost of the school goes up another 20 million dollars without offering a reasonable explanation. Connect the dots as you will. Equipment for an industrial training center costs a lot of money. We gotta continually innovate our policies about the cost of public education as an instrument of industrial interests- in other words, make negotiations and policies up on the fly!