State Board of Education Youth Initiative

What is the Maine State Board of Education?

• Has 9 adult members
• Was created in 1949
• Works collaboratively with the Commissioner and Department of Education on a variety of issues from the qualification of Maine teachers, to approving school construction to ensuring up-to-date technology in Maine schools.
• Its mission is: “to provide statewide leadership by advocating, promoting and improving education policy and life-long learning for all Maine people, particularly its children.  The Board offers advice and direction to the Executive and Legislative branches of state government; thus fulfilling its legislative requirements.
• For more information about the State Board of Education visit www.maine/gov/education/sb/homepage.htm

Getting Youth Involved

The desire to have youth on the Maine State Board of Education started several years ago and like a lot of things, it took time to transform this from an idea into a reality. Jim Carignan, the current chair of the Maine State Board of Education, was instrumental in this process along with other board members and adult community members who felt passionate about the idea. These adults decided to first go to local area youth to ask them to help create a legislative proposal with the intent of turning the idea of having two youth on the Maine State Board of Education into Maine law.  This information was shared with the full board, endorsed the idea at which point then asked Senator Libby Mitchell to sponsor a bill to allow youth on the Maine State Board of Education.  Other legislators advocated for this bill, such as Representative David Farrington, who submitted the bill.  After moving through the proper channels, LD 151 was voted into law. 

Next, funding had to be secured to help ensure that two youth members would be appointed in a thorough and inclusive manner and also that time and energy would be spent talking with youth in Maine about how they might envision young people being involved in educational public policy for years to come. 

In order to accomplish the two over-arching goals of appointing two youth to the Board of Education and creating systems to support youth involvement in educational policy making in the future, the State Board of Education sought out a partner organization.  The Maine Youth Action Network (MYAN), a program of the People’s Regional Opportunity Program, is the organization that was hired to support this initiative.  MYAN will work with both the youth appointed to the board and will work with youth throughout the state of Maine to encourage youth voice and participation in educational policy at all levels. 

Steps to State Board

The next steps in the process for getting two youth appointed to the State Board of Education are the following:

• Hold a youth forum to gather youth input on nomination criteria and visioning for the future
• Finalize an application based on the youth forum input.
• Make application available to all interested youth in the State of Maine that qualify.
• Collect applications for position from all interested youth.
• Committee of the State Board of Education will review applications and conduct interviews as needed. 
• Governor will nominate two youth members to the State Board of Education. 
• Education Committee will hold a confirmation hearing and the Senate will confirm nominations of two youth to the Board.  (This appointment will happen in January 2008 as appointments are only made twice a year.)

If you have questions, concerns or want to discuss this project in more depth please feel free to contact Deb Bicknell at deb@propeople.org or Mary Becker at  mary.becker@maine.gov.  By being involved in this project you are part of making Maine history.  Thanks and we hope you will continue to support this initiative by staying involved.