Dear Editor:

President Trump has made a bad choice, Betsy DeVos, for the U.S. Commissioner of Education. She is a religious zealot who has pushed for the use of public funds to support parochial and other religious schools in Michigan, and who has pushed for the least regulated and most profit-driven charter school environment in the nation.

She talks about school choice, but she means by that a set of laws that take taxpayer money and allow that money to be spent in lightly-regulated charter schools that masquerade as alternative public schools, but that are in reality unaccountable private schools. If she has her way, these school choices will be places which will "advance the Kingdom of God." Her views are distinctly un-American.

Unlike her vision, we have religious freedom, where the state imposes no religion, nor does it prohibit the free exercise of any religion. Unlike her vision, with have a strong system of taxpayer-supported public education governed by publicly-elected, locally-accountable school committees. She would weaken that system instead of invest in it. She would tear down the historic American constitutional protections separating church and state.

Please write to Senator Susan Collins and Senator Angus King and ask them not to support this extremist to oversee the federal role in our education system.

Bruce MacDonald

Boothbay