Politics
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Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner’s hometown high school never lost its accreditation, contrary to a claim that the progressive has made to explain why he attended private institutions.
Platner said on a October podcast that Sumner Memorial High School in Sullivan was unaccredited around 1999, leading his parents to send him briefly to the upscale Hotchkiss School in Connecticut and later to John Bapst Memorial High School in Bangor. But Sumner has been accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges since 1987, the group said.
The candidate’s schooling has been a focus of his supporters and detractors during his campaign against Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins. There has been a national debate about his working-class bonafides that pit his profile as a military veteran and oyster farmer against his schooling and lineage as the grandson of a famous architect.
A Platner spokesperson said the candidate misspoke in the October interview. When asked about his schooling in subsequent interviews, Platner has not talked about the accreditation. The claim also appeared in a blog post by Andy O’Brien, a Platner supporter and spokesperson for Maine AFL-CIO. O’Brien made a correction on Wednesday.
Platner grew up in both Ellsworth and Sullivan, the Hancock County town where he now lives. While Sullivan’s high school did not lose its accreditation in the late 1990s, limited funding threatened the accreditation of dozens of New England schools. For example, Searsport lost accreditation during this time period.
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Platner has built a progressive movement in Maine by railing against the “billionaire class” as part of a message that helped push Gov. Janet Mills, the establishment favorite, out of the race for the right to face Collins. His father, retired lawyer Bronson Platner, is a longtime acquaintance of Mills, the former attorney general.
The candidate is expected to win the Democratic nomination to face Collins in Tuesday’s primary election, though his campaign has been rocked by the weekend disclosure that he sent sexually explicit messages to women early in his marriage. It followed a string of controversies in October, when old, offensive Reddit posts and his tattoo of a Nazi symbol were disclosed.
Daniel O’Connor is a Report for America corps member who covers rural government as part of the partnership between the Bangor Daily News and The Maine Monitor, with additional support from BDN and Monitor readers.