BRUNSWICK

A former school board member has demanded records and meeting notes between the local businessman who wants to establish an international or charter school at Brunswick Landing and any member of the current board who may have met with him.

Michelle Small, who served as an At-Large board member from 2008- 13, notified Brunswick Superintendent of Schools Paul Perzanoski late Monday night in an email that she wanted access to the documents and planned to ask for them under the state’s Freedom of Access Act.

The law guarantees that members of the public may have access to notes and minutes taken during meetings held by public or governmental agencies.

However, Perzanoski said Wednesday that many of the documents Small says she is looking for don’t actually exist — and the ones that do will cost her about $45 in fees to track down, process and deliver.

The kernel of Small’s discontent is local businessman John Stadler’s proposal to establish a charter school for international exchange students somewhere at Brunswick Landing. Small described the idea of such a school in Brunswick as “outlandish,” and added that she’s more concerned with whether the school board’s members adhered to state law guaranteeing public access to discussions held by committees.

Stadler, whose family owns and operates Tao restaurant on Pleasant Street, already has helped to found one charter school in central northwestern Massachusetts in 1994, on a former U.S. Army base that was decommissioned and converted into a planned business and residential park.

Moreover, he currently is working to found a digital arts academy in Wuxi, a city of about 6 million people about 100 miles west of Shanghai on the East China Sea.

An ad hoc charter school committee was formed in spring 2012 to consider local ramifications of such a school in the same proximity as the town’s public school district, as well as the recently-established Harpswell Coastal Academy charter school.

Current board Chairman Jim Grant, William Thompson and Chris McCarthy comprise the ad hoc group. Each of the members met with Stadler at one time or another on an individual and informal basis to hear his idea, Perzanoski said.

But as far as he can recall, prior to a recent informational meeting held on Oct. 23, only one other workshop about the potential school was held, in November 2012, during which all parties attended.

Perzanoski and several staffers have spent about three hours ferreting out what documents exist. They are available to Small, Perzanoski said, as long as she is willing to pay for them.

So far, she is not.

“It’s going to take about four to six hours of work. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, emails and getting together with staff, I’ve probably spent three hours already just on that,” the superintendent said.

“I doubt it there’s any impropriety,” Perzanoski said. “But if there is, and somebody wants to tell the board (members) that they did something wrong, we’d listen. But nobody has told us that yet.”

Perzanoski said the three committee members and Stadler met individually because of the difficulty in finding a time when all could convene.

Adding to the speculation is Brunswick School District’s current effort to draw a limited number of tuitionpaying exchange students from China’s affluent and burgeoning middle class.

In 2012, the district signed a contract with Suzanne Fox, a Bowdoin graduate and owner of Fox Intercultural Consulting in Portland, to cultivate the Midcoast

Sino relationship. Assistant Superintendent Greg Bartlett is scheduled to leave Nov. 1 for a nine-day trip to the country’s Zheijang province as both a goodwill and unofficial recruitment trip.

However, the two efforts to build cozy relationships with Chinese students are separate but parallel endeavors. Where direct exchange students would assimilate into Brunswick High School’s schedule, Stadler’s proposal would ground the Brunswick Landing International School as a semi-private school offering a mix of Advanced Placement secondary school and early college curricula.

Small has written to each of the ad hoc commitee members, as well.

She doesn’t like the idea of a charter school at Brunswick Landing, but says she’s more concerned about the integrity of process.

“There’s at least one reference to a meeting in the (board’s) September minutes, so I’m concered that they’ve been having meetings without telling anybody,” Small said.

“But there have been no public notices and there are no minutes, which is against the law. I suspect that they’ve been negotiating with (Stadler) and discussing the parameters of establishing a charter school, but nobody in the public was privy to it s we don’t know what was discussed.”

Perzanoski, too, acknowledged that another charter school is a longshot.

“If I had to guess, based opon the board’s reaction (during the Oct. 23) workshop, there are lot more members that are against it than are for it,” Perzanoski said Wednesday.

jtleonard@timesrecord.com