March 28, 2024
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Picketers blast $17M SAD 48 budget proposal

NEWPORT – It may have been a small group – just five people – that protested Monday afternoon outside the SAD 48 central office on Route 7, but their words carried plenty of punch.

The group carried posters urging residents to “Vote No” on the proposed $17 million budget at 7 p.m. tonight at Nokomis Regional High School.

One man from Newport, who refused to identify himself, said a swastika should be painted on the superintendent’s office building, while another compared SAD 48 to Communist Russia, and a third said all computers and calculators should be thrown out and the district “should teach the basics.”

Unlike some letters to the editor and public statements by those opposed to the proposed $17 million school budget, this group got personal.

“We want [Superintendent William] Braun gone,” Barbara Marshall of Corinna said. In addition to criticizing the superintendent, Marshall attacked the teachers.

“It doesn’t take money to educate our kids,” she said. “It takes good teachers. Some teachers are not doing what they’re being paid to do.”

A case in point, she contended, was Nokomis Regional High School teacher Beth Paradis of Corinna, who stopped by the protest on the way back from an orthodontist’s appointment.

“We’re paying her salary to teach,” Marshall shouted behind Paradis’ back as she talked to reporters. “Why isn’t she in school?”

Paradis said she supports the proposed budget and was wearing a large “Vote Yes” button. The teacher said she respects “everyone’s right to an opinion, but what matters here are the kids.” Paradis teaches freshman science and said the school has no textbooks for those classes.

“We have overcrowded classrooms, leaking roofs, faulty furnaces,” she said. “There is nothing left to cut but teachers.”

The picketers also were dissatisfied with the town meeting-style voting format.

Roland Dufresne of Hartland said the meeting “is a trick. They used Roberts’ Rules of Order to shut us up.” Dufresne claimed there was no actual counting of votes and nonresidents were voting.

When asked if the changes in voting procedures put in place for this meeting would satisfy his concerns, Dufresne said he was unaware of the changes, despite heavy publicity by two area newspapers.

Some of those changes include providing voters with color-coded cards, restricting nonresidents from the voting area and using town clerks to count votes.

Marshall, who was a member of the Committee for Reasonable Taxes and was appointed as their representative from Corinna as a school board member, said the protest was not being sponsored by CRT. She said she made a few telephone calls and invited people to participate. As she marched, she carried a sign saying: “Braun here to long,” with “too” misspelled.

Jeff Jacob of Corinna stopped by and supported the picketers.

“In many ways, the SAD 48 educational system resembles one of those old Soviet collective factory systems,” Jacob said. “In the failed Soviet system, all the buildings were government owned, all the employees were on the government payroll and funding came by impounding money from the working taxed.”

Inside his office, Braun maintained that the district’s budgeting process and amounts are not the root of the problem. He said the budget increased less than 1 percent, and the overall average of tax impact districtwide was a 1.7 percent increase.

It is the revaluation and increased valuation of properties that has affected the voters, he said. “What happened in Cumberland County 15 years ago has moved up the interstate.

“It’s here. All of this is based on property taxes,” said Braun.


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