There was a well-to-do farmer, Murray Seavy, who lived in the Kennebec River Valley. Murray had extensive land holdings, lots of livestock and at the height of planting and harvest seasons he’d have several dozen employees working at his substantial farm. When he visited his doctor one October morning for a routine checkup, the doctor, […]

Susan Gendron’s tenure as commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, which ends at the end of the month when she steps down after seven years, was defined by two efforts that tried to change the way education has been structured in our state for decades. She began her job in March 2003, as the […]

Organic. Good fats. Bad fats. All natural. Cage free. Free range. For those who value nutritious and humanely produced food, a trip to the grocery store can require a dictionary to help figure out just what is meant by the promises on a label. It is no longer just about fat and calories. People want […]

To put the numbers you are about to read into context, I encourage you to visit the Debt Clock at www.usdebtclock.org. Our present national debt is $12.6 trillion and going up by millions of dollars per hour! The long-term, unfunded liability of our government is $56.4 trillion. Your own household’s share of this debt is […]

Officials propose a $16.4 million penalty, saying the company hid a dangerous defect for several months.

It has been three years since the SAT replaced the Maine Educational Assessment as the assessment tool for the state’s 11th-grade students. The decision at the time was met with resistance by educators, who felt the SAT predicts a student’s chance at success in college rather than mastery of the Maine Learning Results. The use […]

I was moving and shuffling important papers and pamphlets around the office this morning when I came across my stack of spring seed catalogs. During the past few months I’ve wondered a few times whatever happened to those things, so I was glad to see they survived the winter and were still around. Discovering them […]

I am writing in response to an article (“Risky business: Les Otten and the rise and fall of American Skiing Co.”) written by Marian McCue and John Christie published in your paper on March 12. The article was both disappointing and misleading because it was largely based on recycled information – inaccurate and incomplete newspaper […]