Dear Editor:

The school committee voted to spend up to $285,000 to send up to 10 students to the Sheepscot Regional Education Program in Wiscasset, young people so disconnected from the conventional school system that, as Superintendent Kahler said, they cannot walk through the door.

Why are community solutions deleted from the community conversation? I tried to present a proposal to the local economic development council for a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen, which would serve as a focal point for a local subculture centered on handmade production, individual creativity, and the kind of work that cannot be automated or replicated by AI. I was told the council did not engage with individuals or small businesses.

My parents founded Andersen Design in Maine in 1952, sixteen years before the United States Intergovernmental Cooperation Act of 1968 structured a system of federal grant distribution that fueled the rapid growth of the nonprofit sector. They made handmade ceramics with original forms and glazes, no two pieces alike, affordable to the middle class, and bootstrapped their way to success.

My father studied industrial design under Eva Zeisel at Pratt Institute and was twice asked to apprentice with Russel Wright. He chose instead to build his own industry here. The original studio is gone, bulldozed into the ground. The original mold collection survives, and I have launched a campaign to preserve it at ko-fi.com/Y8Y55BM08.

A community that includes individuals and small businesses sends a message that might reach some of those students, while providing alternative making spaces to those in the industrialized public educational system, which, through the University of Maine, endangers individual ownership of intellectual property rights of any project the school deems uses the publicly funded facilities more than incidentally.

A small-business economic development zone can serve as an alternative teaching environment to industrial job training in our public schools, offering an option for cultural misfits. If a public school can be an industrial job training facility, why can’t private industry be an educational system?

And the tourist industry is not the only economy worth developing on this peninsula.

Mackenzie Andersen

Boothbay Harbor